Listen up for more days of the triffid - David Lodge book review

Published on Friday 9 May 2008 18:06

DEAF SENTENCE

David Lodge

Harvill Secker, 17.99

THE novels of David Lodge are like pleasant walks through a rambling estate, the landscape pulling few surprises, the flora embedded, well tended, decorative, the sky a passage of moods, and the distant mansion, towards which the path must always lead, a place of haven, solidly roofed, secure, presenting journey's end as a point of rest.

Do not read Lodge for post-modern tricks or stylistic fireworks. His 14th novel extends the terrain by a well-furrowed acre or so. The view, as ever, is clearly etched. And worth exploring.

Desmond Bates, a retired linguistics professor, now fading into his 60s, is going deaf. He misses the campus. He feels eclipsed by his younger wife, Fred, who runs a dcor shop. He is burdened by his old dad, and out of close touch with his son and daughter.

When he meets Alex, a young American postgraduate, at a party, events take on a sinister twist. Not having heard a word she says (though pretending he has), he agrees to go to her apartment to talk about her thesis, a stylistic analysis of suicide notes.

The whole thing is told through Desmond's journal, so we must trust him in order to make the book plausible. He confides his near-depression and irritation, caused by his deafness, and points to the cracks in his unequal marriage.

Sequences given to scholarly combing of various language systems and other modes of analysis are meant to provide his character with campus authenticity and to underpin his entanglement with Alex. These references could be fewer. A further bane of Lodge's method derives from the often protracted detail of his everyday affairs.

There is much that is wonderful here: Desmond's fully engaging nature, the poignant backing track of his parents' lives and times, his father's demise and the fragile membrane that holds them together. Desmond's marriage is beautifully caught in its weather-swept moods, while the plot veers in unexpected directions just when you think it is all foredoomed.

The least beguiling and believable thing in the book is Alex herself, a seeming intruder from a completely different genre. She is the triffid in the flower bed, and if you like triffids you'll thrill to her nonsense. If not, beware.