PenguinReaders' Group
 

Editors' Choice

By Tony Lacey, Publishing Director, Penguin Books

Deaf Sentence

Deaf Sentence by David Lodge

David Lodge is that rare thing: a serious comic novelist. His books are genuinely funny but never facetious or trivial. In fact, over more than forty years he has explored the whole social arena of modern Britain, from early books about national service and students' anxieties about contraception, through the collision of industry and academia in the 80s, to our modern obsession with therapy in all its forms. He, together with his great friend, the late Malcolm Bradbury, is perhaps most famous for his campus novels including Small World, Changing Places and Nice Work though I think that can be a rather reductive term: the university offers a wonderfully intense environment for a novelist to write about, with its jealousies, ambitions, betrayals, and so on - in fact, the world in microcosm.

Deaf Sentence is a semi-campus novel. Desmond has recently retired from his job as a professor of linguistics, and ironically is now having trouble with his hearing. At the same time his wife's career - her whole life in fact - is flourishing. When an attractive postgraduate student asks him to privately supervise her doctorate on the language of suicide notes, he thinks it might be fun - more fun, and more alarming, as it turns out than he could possibly have imagined. Deaf Sentence is deeply moving as we watch Desmond struggling with his affliction and with his increasing helplessness in the face of what comes to seem an increasingly hostile world, and to that extent it's a slightly darker novel than some of his earlier books. But there are some wonderful comic set pieces (Desmond trying to cope with the conversation at a Christmas party...) and ultimately the novelist's interest in and sympathy for his characters shine through.

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