Column

I first read David Lodge in the 1980s. His campus novels were a treat, but one novel that made me fall in love with his writing was Nice Work — a love story about two unlikely lovers: a feminist university teacher specialising in the industrial novel and women’s writing, and the manager of an engineering firm.

Unlike other authors, it is very hard to establish a direct connect between Lodge and his characters. But in his latest novel Deaf Sentence I see a glimpse of the man in the writer. Some years ago, while I was in London, Blake Morrison, another English writer, invited me to join Lodge and him for supper before a book event. While I had seen pictures of Lodge, I had never met him before, so when I saw him walk in, I was surprised. He was the man I had seen on the train to that little suburb across the river. I was drawn to him by his closed-in look. As if he was isolated from everything happening around him.

It’s silly, but just as one expects clowns to crack a joke everyminute, in my mind, I had expected animation to be Lodge’s very soul. Silly, silly me! Writers don’t have to be their books.

What I also remember was watching him fuddle with a hearing aid. At first, I thought it was one of those hi-tech music gadgets (this being pre-iPod days) but later all of it fell into place and I realised that David Lodge wore a hearing aid.

Deaf Sentence is the story of a man learning to live with deafness. And as the main character, professor Desmond Bates, says, “deafness is comic, as blindness is tragic”. Nevertheless, what a deaf person has to deal with is perhaps just as debilitating as a blind person’s handicap. The degree of pain can’t be any less, surely.

And so it occurs to me that there is an unequal contest within our own selves. By how we divide all our ailments and afflictions into the realm of either tragic or comic. A coughing bout induces concern, a fit of hiccups triggers giggles. Losing teeth is funny, but losing a finger isn’t. Parkinsons is tragic but Tourette Syndrome is comic.

How is it that we discriminate against our own body parts? Does one part of our anatomy, or one physiological function, mean less than the others to us? It baffles me to no end…

Anita Nair is the author of the novels The Better Man, Ladies Coupe, Mistress and Good Night and God Bless.