Psykko Rain Dance

I have just finished reading Deaf Sentence by David Lodge. As usual, this latest in the stream of books that David Lodge has written about various academics, uses a mix of styles and tenses to suggest an unconstructed narrative without actually descending into the realms of the usual heuristics of the modern novel. And yet deep down, while it seems to move towards a tidy conclusion, it ends up being just a window on a wider world. Of course (and I have to use this phrase in any review of a Lodge Novel) there is nothing outside the text so my sudden realisation of what was going on and what the conclusion would be, remained just a thought in my head for that bombshell was left undropped - indeed not mentioned again.

The Guardian Digested Read of Deaf Sentence laments the lame puns of the misunderstandings created by mishearings but I have to say that my request for "Deaf Sentence" in the bookshop resulted in a computer search for "Death Sentence" (though not on the "Death Menu") before I corrected the assistant. There is deep satisfaction in the fact that a profound and clever academic seems so able to pick out the details of modern life without seeming a distant and unavailable observer. It is possible to pick out many layers from any David Lodge book, to see a straight story, allusions to older, literary classics (Knobsticks!) and beautiful examples of deep areas of academia that us mortals can't really hope to understand fully.

Oh - and it is quite funny as well.