This is a closely observed and moving novel that reflects the author's personal experience of becoming deaf. There is a wealth of thematic richness and Lodge explores it painstakingly, alternating between the first and third person as he recounts the main character's struggles with ageing, mortality, seduction, isolation, loss and hope. This is, as you might expect, given the twin academic specialisms of author and narrator, a very bookish novel.
The effect on Lodge's narrative can be engagingly digressive. But the digressiveness, while no doubt faithfully representing the thought processes of a nice man in late middle age with a lot of important things on his mind, lends the text a halting, meandering, inhibited quality.
Hardcover 320 pages 2008 |
