Deaf Sentence (2008) by David Lodge

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reviewed by John Murphy

There is something appropriate about David Lodge writing on the ruefully comic trials and tribulations of deafness. He is a master chronicler of the seriocomic frustrations of daily life, whether it be the sexual frustrations of young Catholics post Vatican II in How Far Can You Go, or the family frustrations of a beleagured grad student juggling the demands of home life and academia in The British Museum is Falling Down.

Deaf Sentence is a work of fiction, but Lodge admits in a postscript that he drew on his own experience with hearing loss, as well as that of his father’s, to tell the tale of Desmond Bates, a retired professor of linguistics attempting, with mitigated success, to navigate the world minus one reliable sense. The subject suits Lodge because “deafness is comic, as blindness is tragic,” in the words of Bates (whose namesake is the hard-of-hearing Miss Bates from Jane Austen’s Emma), and Lodge specializes in that particularly British brand of wry, dry humor, that is more appropriate to the mishaps of deaf-induced misunderstandings than the arguably bleaker fate of all-encompassing darkness.

Deaf Sentence touches on weighty topics like suicide, mortality, and bodily degeneration, but Lodge never lets the gloom overwhelm his highly cultivated taste for slapstick, wordplay, and the comic hijinks of a hapless hero. Lodge’s Desmond is a humane, sympathetic portrait of a sixty-something man struggling to find meaning in his unstructured retirement, and human connection in spite of his isolating deafness. Lodge reapportions his own Catholicism to the wife of his protagonist, which allows Lodge to comment on the comforts of faith from the outside rather than the inside, as seen through the eyes of a curmudgeonly agnostic confronting his own mortality.

A visit to Auschwitz during a lecture tour reminds Desmond of the true nature of silence, that overpowering silence that is the silence of the tomb, or the silence of God. He writes, “Deafness is a kind of pre-death, a drawn-out introduction to the long silence into which we will all eventually lapse.” Yet, as Beethoven is supposed to have said on his deathbed, “I will hear in heaven.”