Name: Deaf Sentence
Rating: 4 (3 reviews)
ISBN: 9780141035703

David Lodge

Frustrated by hearing loss and his messy personal life, retired linguistics professor Desmond Bates reluctantly journeys to London to check up on his elderly father and finds his hearing problems resulting in an unintended relationship with a young woman.

Deaf Sentence

A retired professor strugles with the domestic and social conflicts incurred by his encroaching deafness.

Deaf sentence

Gavin

Gentle, silly-solemn but limp campus novel. Examines being middle-class middle-age without angst, despite the narrator’s being very hard of hearing. Though there is a sudden token Auschwitz section which gets about one page of build-up and is soon left behind (when the actual plot revives itself). 

It's less farcical - its characters' ambitions less contemptible - its plot less unabashedly neat than Lodge's usual style (though there is this: “Perhaps one day we’ll turn up in a campus novel” – “God, I hope not”). I miss that.

When the university merged his Department of Linguistics with English, Professor Desmond Bates took early retirement, but he is not enjoying it. He misses the purposeful routine of the academic year, and has lost his appetite for research.His wife Winifred's late-flowering career goes from strength to strength, reducing his role to that of escort and househusband, while the rejuvenation of her appearance makes him uneasily conscious of the age gap between them. The monotony of his days is relieved only by wearisome journeys to London to check on the welfare of his eighty-nine-year-old father, an ex dance musician who stubbornly refuses to move from the house he is patently unable to live in with safety.But these discontents are nothing compared to the affliction of hearing loss, which is a constant source of domestic friction and social embarrassment. In the popular imagination, he observes, deafness is comic, as blindness is tragic, but for the deaf person himself it is no joke. It is through his deafness that Desmond inadvertently gets involved with a young woman whose wayward and unpredictable behaviour threatens to destabilise his life completely.Funny and moving by turns, Deaf Sentence is a brilliant account of one man's effort to come to terms with deafness and death, ageing and mortality, the comedy and tragedy of human lives.

Deaf Sentence

Reviews

Highlights