If novelists were given grades, David Lodge would long ago have had a starred first for his special subject: campus comedy. Satiric zest and rueful knowledgeability winningly combine in his continuing fictional survey of the assorted absurdities of academic life. The British Museum is Falling Down (1965) boisterously chronicled the pitfalls of postgraduate research. Changing Places (1975) revelled in culture shocks triggered by an exchange programme between a dank British redbrick university and a vibrant college on America's west coast. The extravagances of the international conference circuit were lampooned in Small World (1985). Nice Work (1988) cast an ironic eye over a post-structuralist feminist academic and an unreconstructed Midlands industrialist paired by a job-swap scheme. Overwrought antics on creative-writing courses were put under the spotlight in Lodge's play, The Writing Game (1996). Thinks... (2001) recorded the tribulations of a writer-in-residence. Now, Deaf Sentence moves on to retirement and its repercussions.

Desmond Bates, in his early sixties, is a linguistics specialist who has seized the chance provided by an organisational shake-up at his northern university to vacate his professorial chair. After an initial surge of euphoria, a sense of aimlessness has set in and he finds himself hankering after the routines and rhythms of the academic year. Like other retired colleagues, he still frequents the campus. Unlike them, he gets drawn into an ill-advised association with a busty blonde young American PhD student whose thesis topic - “A stylistic analysis of suicide notes” - proves alarmingly indicative of her appetite for trouble. The farcical shenanigans that ensue as she seeks to entangle Desmond in her plans are kept subordinate, though, to the novel's main concerns.

The reason why Desmond has prematurely quit a job he valued is his deafness. Lodge, a fellow-sufferer, writes with stoically funny flair about the social disasters and private chagrins this inflicts. Parties and other gatherings become minefields of misunderstanding through which the deaf tread gingerly, wearing facial expressions they hope “will seem appropriate, or at least not grotesquely inappropriate” to whatever is being said. Mishearings, as in Desmond's first encounter with the suicide-note student, can unleash surreal chain reactions of miscomprehension.

Out of these faux pas and blunders, Lodge derives an entertaining narrative, to which he adds fascinating and instructive layers. As an expert in phonetics, Desmond is well equipped to diagnose what is bedevilling him. He is, he recognises, failing to pick up consonants, whose higher frequency makes them more difficult to catch than lower-pitched vowels. The auditory babble that turns crowded social events into an ordeal is generated, he knows, by the Lombard Reflex, a response that causes speakers to “increase their vocal effort in the presence of noise in the environment in order to resist degradation of the intelligibility of their messages”, and which in crowded situations, of course, amplifies the problem. Causes of deafness, the ins and outs of different kinds of hearing aid and the quirky satisfactions of lip-reading classes are informatively and sometimes hilariously documented, too.

As might be expected, given Lodge's background, fictional figures with hearing problems, from Eeyore to old Mrs Bates in Emma, come in for shrewd comment. Celebrity casualties of deafness (Goya, Beethoven) are brought in to boost morale. But, as Desmond glumly realises, the condition is most likely to be regarded as comic. How very different in effect Milton's great lament about his blindness would be, he reflects, if instead of, “Oh dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon”, it read, “Oh deaf, deaf, deaf, amid the noise of noon.” Even Philip Larkin, always game to tackle the depressing, never wrote a poem about the deafness that afflicted him.

What Larkin did write a memorable poem about was death - a subject with which Deaf Sentence increasingly engages. Jokey word play on the phonetic closeness between “deaf” and “death” (for Desmond, the lip-reading class is Deaf Row) modulates into something deeper as the novel progresses. Its later chapters are dominated by the final days of Desmond's father, a cantankerously independent and obsessively frugal south Londoner simmering with dark suspicions about the wiles of the Inland Revenue and the almost open fraudulence of Premium Bond draws. In a novel more and more threaded through with intimations of mortality (from suicide notes to Desmond's revelation of what happened at his first wife's deathbed), the scenes surrounding the old man's dying have affecting credibility. The book's triumph is to infuse all this with appealing vitality, both through the witty verve of Lodge's prose and his exhilaratingly sharp scrutiny of the world around him.

Deaf Sentence by David Lodge
Harvill Secker £17.99 pp294 Buy from Books First £16.19 plus free delivery

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