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Deaf Sentence
by David Lodge
Vintage, HK$288
Hands up anyone who is excited by the idea of a novel about being hard of hearing.
What's more, its hero is a white, middle-class, retired professor of linguistics (yawn) who lives in a provincial English town and who is coping with a cooling marriage, a senile father and an unbalanced graduate student. He has a bit too much to drink at a family Christmas party. He visits Poland, and comes back. He goes to lip-reading classes. Not much sex, no violence, no rock or roll. No car chases.
And yet (if you're still reading), the absence of the usual ingredients of best-sellerdom should not put you off David Lodge's new book; and if it does, you will have missed a thoughtful, humane, satisfying
novel by a writer who is a master
of making credible, ordinary, experience into something of absorbing interest, and a little strange.
This, after all, is one of the things  novels are for. They extend our sympathies, and can give us, as Joseph Conrad said, a feeling of solidarity with our fellow creatures.
Desmond Bates, the novel's narrator, is a decent and unremarkable fellow who is worried about the things that preoccupy us all - money, family, sex, career, health - but an extra level of sympathy and curiosity is aroused by his deafness.
Deafness could happen to any of us. It has happened to  Lodge. And even though it is the opposite of a glamorous condition, the account this book gives of deafness turns out to be one of the chief reasons for reading and enjoying it.
We all know deaf people, but most of us who can hear actually know, and think, very little about what everyday life is like for them.
What's it like going to the theatre if you're deaf? How difficult is it to read lips? How do you cope with the telephone? Are there hearing dogs for the deaf, as there are guide dogs for the blind? (Yes, there are.)
We learn about  these practical details from Desmond's story. He is not self-pitying, but perhaps there is something especially poignant about a deaf professor of linguistics. Blindness is tragic, he thinks; it has an invincible dignity.
However deafness is comic - at least to other people. Half-joking, he punctuates his story with phrases built out of the phonetic near-equivalence of deaf and death. The Deaf Instinct. Deaf and the Maiden. Deaf Row.
The play on words in the book's title takes on a cumulative metaphysical resonance.
Lodge is best known for Changing Places and Small World, comic novels about the lives of academics. These books make fun of the self-important nonsense of scholarly conferences and controversies, but professors like them because they are secretly flattered to see their lives portrayed as amusing and even sexy.
Desmond Bates in Deaf Sentence is a professor too, and there are comic moments in his story, but in the main the tone is relatively sober and reflective.
One of the chief strands of the plot concerns his becoming entangled with a promising female postgraduate student whose behaviour becomes increasingly alarming. These things do happen. The other main theme of the story is his family and in particular the decline of Desmond's father into failing health and mental confusion. This is described meticulously and though it is a sad story, it is not a disheartening one.
His father has a stroke, as it happens, while Desmond is lecturing in Poland, where he makes a visit to the site of the death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Auschwitz is the emotional and intellectual centre of Desmond's story.
But death does not have the last word in Deaf Sentence. The father dies, a grandchild is born: the family regroups, life goes on. Deaf shall have no dominion.



Deaf Sentence