DAVID LODGE Deaf Sentence ***(*)

This is the often very funny, wry and sometimes moving story of an academic who has taken early retirement from a northern university, but is plagued by severe hearing loss. Why is it, he wonders, that blindness is always viewed as tragic and deafness as comic?

As well as having to cope with the bother of hearing aids and their batteries and the general monotony of everyday life now that he's not working, he also has to contend with an 89-year old father who lives on his own in London, and a totally unhinged American PhD student who tries to seduce him.

Lots of the book is obviously autobiographical (David Lodge is a retired academic with severe hearing loss). The trouble is it often seems like a patchwork quilt of short stories and articles and humorous scenes that he's been saving up for a few years, and it doesn't really hang together.

Nevertheless it did make me laugh and there are some touching moments that rang very true.