"Writing a novel is a very anxious business for me, and increasingly so." David Lodge may be a highly successful and much-loved author and literary critic, but his anxiety does not dissipate with the launch of each new book.

"My early novels were written with what seems to me now extraordinary speed," says Lodge, 73, who was writing fiction at the same time as teaching English Literature at the University of Birmingham and helping his wife to bring up three children. He took early retirement to write full-time in 1986.

"I don't think they're as complex as the later novels and that's partly why they were written more quickly. The longer you go on, it doesn't get any easier, it gets harder, and as an artist or writer you're putting yourself up for judgement. You fear failure, and therefore a lot of the effort of writing a particular book is thinking about what you've written and what you're going to write and how to make it as copper-bottomed as it can be."

Lodge's early novels such as The British Museum is Falling Down may have been written fast but quickly established him as a leading British comic writer, often exploring serious topics through humour.

He has been twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction for Small World and Nice Work, part of his famous campus trilogy, as well as winning numerous other awards, yet fears resting on his laurels. "If you didn't feel insecure you probably wouldn't do your best work," he says.

In Lodge's latest novel, Deaf Sentence, retired professor of linguistics Desmond Bates is fighting a losing battle with his acquired hearing loss. 

It is written from experience: Lodge's hearing has deteriorated since his forties and he wears two discreet aids. Though Lodge finds deafness "a low-level kind of constant irritation and frustration" he enjoyed the lipreading classes he attended for 18 months and may continue in future, praising the support they offer those who are "isolated and sidelined by families or the community" due to deafness.

"The novel really started when one day I was shaving and I suddenly thought I could write a comic novel about the experience of being deaf. The next day when I wrote this down in my notebook I thought I would link it to the experience of monitoring my father's welfare in the last year or so of his life, which was an interesting and rather emotional experience," Lodge says. 

"He was deaf from old age but didn't use a hearing aid, he was 93 when he died, and in consequence, it isn't a completely comic novel. There are comic passages in it but it's also about ageing and mortality, and deafness is in some ways a sign of that," he says.

"There is also a kind of punning association between the two concepts. For hearing impaired persons it's quite hard to tell the difference between the two words 'deaf' and 'death'. Even people with normal hearing can't distinguish them unless they have a context. These two words are so close together phonologically and yet different in meaning – that's the structural principle behind the book," says Lodge.

"There's a lot about the comic mishaps and absurd mistakes, humiliations associated with deafness, but there's also a lot about death," he says. "[Desmond] visits Auschwitz at the end – to be sent to Auschwitz was a death sentence; he's in the position of having to decide whether his father should be kept on a life support system or allowed to die, so he is invited to pronounce a death sentence," Lodge explains.

And the title Deaf Sentence has a second meaning. "The word sentence doesn't just mean a judicial punishment, it can mean an opinion, a philosophy, a point of view, etymologically, and Desmond is a linguist so aware of the derivations of words. This book is the sentence, the sentiments, the opinions, the philosophy of a deaf person," he says.

In the novel, Desmond feels increasingly sidelined as his wife's success grows.  At her Boxing Day party, the batteries for Desmond's hearing aid suddenly run out. In order to cope with not hearing, he speaks in monologue to the guests, not giving them a chance to speak, escaping the party at intervals to refill his glass from his secret supply of good wine.

To one of his wife's most valued customers, he lists, at length, the rather unflattering connotations of her name; to a woman who he later discovers has just had a mastectomy he delivers a lecture on the Wonderbra. His wife's efforts to stop him go unheeded:

'The visual memory of the glare from his wife troubles him slightly. It belongs to a series of frowns and disapproving glances and remarks hissed into his ear (which conveyed as much sense to him as air escaping from a tyre valve) received in the past hour, which he suspects are messages that in her opinion he is either drinking too much or talking too much – probably both.'

Lodge himself regrets that he can no longer amuse by being spontaneous in conversation - but at the same time says he was never "a terrifically exuberant, fun person." 
 

"I think many students came to Birmingham University having read my novels thinking I was going to be a riot and were very disappointed [laughs]. I was a rather severe
teacher, I believe."

Yet if Lodge is not an entertainer, nor is he dour; rather, he is a quiet observer of others. And successfully so, as it is the judicious use of small details that makes his characters shine with humour. The billowing Laura Ashley nightie that perfectly matches the personality of feminist academic Robyn Penrose in Nice Work, the third in his campus trilogy, is but one example.

Names are also created with care. "I thought the fact that [Robyn] was an ambiguous name gender-wise would be a source of plot material, there could be some fun in that, and I chose Penrose because it's a very symbolic name, pen for the literary part of her character and rose for the female beauty part of it. And I wanted a name that sounded plausible, not like a Dickens name that's made up, like Chuzzlewit," Lodge says.

Robyn 'shadows' factory manager Vic Wilcox, whose world so sharply contrasts with hers. His name is "a combination of 'will' - very macho, wanting to dominate, the boss, and 'cox' - somewhat phallic, or male anyway," says Lodge. "He's a bit of a softie but outwardly he's a macho man."

Wilcox is played by the strapping Warren Clarke in the successful 1989 BBC adaptation of Nice Work (written by Lodge). "In the book he's rather small, so he's always trying to compensate for his small stature, but in the television version he was played by Warren Clarke, very well, and of course Warren Clarke's much more like a typical Midlands managing director," he says.

"I made my character small because I didn't want him to be confused with the friend in industry who was my mole and who took me around – my friend is actually rather like Warren Clarke, so in a curious way television ended up portraying my friend much more closely than the book."

In Deaf Sentence Lodge names his femme fatale Alex Loom, and Desmond mis-hears 'Alex' for the more sinister 'Axe.' Lodge initially chose 'Loom' for its associations with 'doom' and because he wanted a name that would not be associated with anyone in real life – only later discovering other meanings.

"For instance, an implement or tool, a spider's web, an open vessel, a boat, a part of an oar between the hand and the blade, a variety of diving birds in northern seas, a glow in the sky caused by reflection of light from a lighthouse, a mirage over water or ice, a bundle of parallel insulating electric wires and most bizarrely a penis," he says, laughing. "So all those things, and many of them are quite appropriate to her. So that was writer's luck."
 
Comedy aside, it is the theme of ageing and mortality in Deaf Sentence that gives the novel its depth. Some of its best scenes concern Desmond's relationship with his elderly father, who finds it increasingly difficult to take care of himself but does not want outside help. Desmond has to make a difficult decision about his father's future, and after a visit to Auschwitz, his own problems seem to be thrown into perspective.

Lodge drew on the experience of looking after his own father before he died a few years ago; he says he could not have written the book until after his father's death, as although the portrait is affectionate, his father was not easy to deal with in later life. 

Unlike some contemporaries, Lodge believes that there is "an element of delicacy" about using real-life experiences, though he notes that "a lot of great novelists had no such scruples - DH Lawrence was always using his friends often in very prejudicial ways, causing huge offence, and James Joyce was the same." 
"If you're going to write realistic fiction, you can't make it all up," he says. "You've got to base your characters and incidents to some extent on reality that you've observed, but there are ways of disguising it, combining it with fiction."

As a writer, Lodge is sometimes frustrated by his deafness. "It weighs on me because the social intercourse side of being a writer depends on speech [though] it doesn't affect the work itself, which is a silent process."  He can no longer lift dialogue from conversations overheard on the bus, relying on his imagination or subtitled television programmes for information about speech in contemporary culture and society.

"The other side of literary life – things like being involved in TV or stage work where you're collaborating with people – it's a great handicap there; answering the telephone is difficult; the fact that email has almost completely replaced the telephone as an instrument of business has been a huge boon," he says. 

At home, he regrets not being able to hear the "tiny, piping voices" of his two youngest granddaughters and is relieved the third has turned 10 and so he can finally hear her. In a marriage deafness is a source of "friction and frustration," he says. "There will be moments when both parties will get rather cross with each other and themselves and that is sadly unavoidable," he says, but also counsels that couples should not let it spoil their relationship. "There is no simple solution," he says.

As well as being open about the frustrations of deafness, Lodge also talks freely about anxiety, a theme he explored in his 1996 novel Therapy. The book's hero, Tubby Passmore, is unhappy despite his success as a TV sitcom writer. "That was what interested me and puzzled me. My and Tubby's problem is anxiety. The anxiety latches on to something quite trivial, then you blame yourself for something and start to think negatively and that throws you into depression," he says.

Widespread depression in Western society may be linked to the collapse of religious belief, Lodge thinks. "People have no hope of anything beyond this life, so that if this life doesn't satisfy them then they get depressed."

Lodge attended cognitive behavioural therapy sessions for several years, which helped him to control anxious feelings. Writing is not simply therapy for Lodge, yet it can fruitfully channel anxiety: "If you have an innate talent for writing, you can turn any negative experience into something positive by projecting it in an imagined way so that it gives pleasure, entertainment, instruction to other people. That's a great privilege and is probably what has kept me from being a totally intolerable and depressed person," he says.

Deaf Sentence is published by Harvill Secker at £17.99.

The original version of this interview was printed in One in Seven magazine. Join RNID to get One in Seven every two months.