Deaf Sentence
by David Lodge (Harvill Secker, £17.99)
“What a terrible title!” may be your first response, as it was mine, to David Lodge’s new novel. But hang on a minute: it’s better than you think. Obviously enough, a pun is being perpetrated. The first word of the phrase “death sentence” has been mispelled—or misheard—to create another phrase, “deaf sentence.” This slippage suggests two things: that going deaf is a bit like being handed a punishment; and that deafness has something in common with death. But the title’s punning possibilities don’t end there. The word “sentence” could be taken in its linguistic, not juridical, sense. In which case, a different set of questions would be confronting us, to do with the relationship between deafness and language.
The hard-of-hearing person in question is Desmond Bates, a retired professor of linguistics in his mid-sixties who lives in an unnamed northern city. We first encounter him at a party in an art gallery, stooping and straining to hear what is being said by the pretty young blonde who has struck up a conversation with him. It’s a forlorn battle: she talks, he feigns fascination (”Very interesting,” “Yes,” “Absolutely”), and he emerges from their 15-minute “conversation” none the wiser as to what it was about. This kind of experience has become depressingly common for Desmond. Half the time he has no idea what people are saying to him; and even when he thinks he knows, he usually gets some crucial word wrong. Language, in its spoken aspect, has become an instrument of proliferating and ever more imprecise meanings—a disconcerting experience for a professor of linguistics. Desmond’s wife, Winifred (whom he calls “Fred”), is a brisk businesswoman in charge of a thriving interior design business. On the whole, she bears her husband’s failing hearing with good grace, but he suspects—not without reason—that her tolerance has a limit.
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