Inspiring Older Readers

posted on 22 Jul 2018

Deaf Sentence by David Lodge

At the end of this novel, David Lodge notes in his acknowledgements that “the narrator’s deafness and his Dad have their sources in my own experience but the other characters in this novel are fictional characters.” Lodge’s book was published in 2008 when he was 73 and his own hearing problems had become so acute he could no longer justify covering up his experiences. In an interview given to the Daily Mail when Deaf Sentence was published, it was noted that:

"For ten years, the Whitbread Award-winning author, now 73, tried to hide his hearing loss. 'Unlike other disabilities, deafness can be concealed, and it's tempting to do this, especially when it's gradual,' he says. 'It's not just about vanity, but about fears of old age and mortality.'" 

Lodge’s fictional character, Desmond Bates is a retired professor of linguistics who lives with his second wife, Winifred - always called "Fred" by Bates - in an unnamed, northern town. He fears his decision to retire might have been precipitous and he’s finding his life lacks a centre. Fred has reinvented herself as the owner of an interior decorating shop and finds Bates’ rather bumbling incapacity to deal with his deafness intrusively irritating.

On top of all this, Bates also has an elderly, increasingly vulnerable father who lives alone in South London in a depressing little house that Desmond must visit on a regular basis for encounters that are fractious and repetitious.

Fred, who has recently rediscovered Catholicism, is in fact Bates’ second wife – his first having died of a long drawn-out death from cancer. She is intent on having a social and family life Desmond finds more and more difficult to cope with because of his deafness and the fact that his Dad is something of a social liability in Fred’s middle class world adds to his social discomfort.

You’d think that all of this is a recipe for a very depressing book and in some ways it is pretty grim as we witness the action through Bates’ eyes. But the book isn’t as two-dimensional as this makes it sound because it’s shot through with a sort of bleak humour and a series of semi-farcical misunderstandings fuelled by Desmond’s deafness. Appropriately enough given the fact that he is a linguistics professor, many of the jokes are at Desmond’s expense as he mishears and misunderstands quite simple sentences – think of a sort of deaf Mrs Malaprop.

The deafness, his Dad’s slow degeneration and his slightly fractious relationship with his wife are the key ingredients of the book but Lodge introduces a parallel and eventually interlacing storyline that involves an encounter with a clearly mentally unstable female graduate student, Alex Loom, who is working on a thesis about suicide notes. She canvasses Desmond’s help with some unofficial supervision of her research but it’s clear, to us at least, that it’s not only a first name she has in common with Alex Forrest in the film Fatal Attraction.

I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that ultimately Desmond has to come to terms with (but not necessarily accept) both his deafness and the death of his Dad. The reconciliation means you have to let go of regret and accept your humanity:

“You could say that birth itself is a sentence of death – I expect some glib philosopher has said it somewhere – but it is a perverse and useless thought. Better to dwell on life, and try to value the passing time.”

There's undoubtedly something therapeutic in the way Lodge downloads his frustrations in this book - he clearly has gripes that have been building up inside as his deafness got worse. And I think Lodge is right when he has Desmond Bates fulminate about just how little status as a disability deafness is afforded – using hearing loss as a trigger for humour and ridicule happens in a way that wouldn’t be acceptable for other disabilities. I can also sympathise with the idea that age-related hearing loss is not just a social and personal encumbrance but a signpost on the path to the grave. Deafness as symptomatic of aging and as a symbol of our ultimate mortality highlights that these are not just physical problems but psychological ones too.

As someone who is himself progressing inexorably towards the exit sign, it’s impossible to avoid monitoring and chronicling the bits of your body that are failing you. Having the little hairs in your ears that detect sound waves die off before the rest of you is a ghastly prefiguring of what awaits the rest of you.

 

Terry Potter

July 2018