Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time (Jonathan Cape)Not quite fiction because some of it is true but not really biography because not all of it is, my main concern with a novel like this is about suspension of disbelief, or belief, as the case may be, and how much to believe or not believe. The credit at the end, citing Elizabeth Wilson's biography of Shostakovich, was a worry and in places we are told things that read as if they could have been lifted directly from a factual account. But one person's facts are not always like another person's version and many reports of history are falsified, mistaken or otherwise misreported so objective truths are a fugitive thing and, all that aside, it was not long before this compelling short novel had made such issues seem trivial.
Those of us who misspent our youth reading Solzhenitsyn are back on familiar territory in Stalin's Soviet Union, not only the sinister atmosphere and paranoia but also in the name and patronymic way that people are addressed and that candle of humanity blown about by the winds of totalitarianism. While Stravinsky and Prokofiev were driving flash cars and living celebrity lives in the USA, Shostakovich stayed in Russia,
He declined to imagine any alternative.
It was surely the braver thing to do, an act of some self-sacrifice, but time and again Shostakovich is seen as cowardly. Even his naming as Dmitri Dmitrievich was going to be Yaroslav Dmitrievich until his mother and father were talked out of it by a bullying priest. Early on,
he knew he was a shy and anxious person. And with women, when he lost his shyness, he veered between absurd enthusiasm and lurching despair.
The novel begins with him waiting by the lift door in his apartment block, expecting to be arrested, so that his family aren't traumatized by witnessing him being taken away never to be seen again, but it never happens. From there, his life thus far is seen in the flashback of his contemplating and then onwards into subsequent events. But in Julian Barnes' text, it is not narrative but an essay, a commentary not entirely from the composer's point of view.
Of the many themes brought together, the main one is about orthodoxy, the clash between the expectations of the state for their composers to produce music undemanding enough to be for all the people and the art of the individual who was the greatest composer of his generation in that country, and by now, possibly the greatest of the century from any country. The Soviets, and Stalin in particular, regarded contemporary music as formalist and decadent and so the composer has to tread this fine line between integrity and 'poltical correctness'.
Visiting America and seeing the 'free, capitalist' West, he has precious little relief in such iconic artists and thinkers as Picasso or Sartre,
How easy it was to be a Communist when you weren't living under Communism!
and he is regaled by journalists with such questions as whether he prefers blondes or brunettes. But he retains his respect for Stravinsky's music.
One of the cases in point in Shostakovich's early compositions was the opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtensk, which offended the Soviets the most and the ban on performances of it put a premature end for him to a whole genre in which he would have produced much more. But if the death of Stalin resulted in some thaw in ideology and a reduction in massacre on an industrial scale, the insinuating of the composer into the post of Chairman of the Union of Soviet Composers and, as a corollary, becoming a party member under Khrushchev, who knew 'as much about music as a pig knows about oranges', in some ways becomes more of an ordeal than what he was going through before. He signs articles purporting to be written by him without even reading them because to check and make any alterations would be to give them some validity.
Barnes makes the story an uneasy reminder to those of us lucky enough to be as free as we are, and still complaining, that precious few have ever been so and that our blase reliance on such glib strategies as irony are too comfortable and easy. In two brilliant pages on irony, when even Rostropovich misses the point in the Cello Concerto, it proves to be a potentially self indulgent and insufficient.
Even Shakespeare is a little naive because his tyrants 'had doubts, bad dreams, pangs of conscience, guilt',
But in real life, under real terror, what guilty conscience?
And so, on those terms, why would we respect such a knowing, literary composition as The Noise of Time compared to the work of Shostakovich, Akhmatova, Yevtushenko, Solzhenitsyn and Pasternak. Although it's not our fault we are so blessed that we never had to go through what they suffered and it is not our fault that our music and writing wasn't put under such duress in the crucible of such a regime.
But, not even that, ultimately. The best art defines itself and an explication of a work's title can often be a way into interpretation of what it is 'about'.
Art, it says, is the whisper of history above the noise of time. Which is good, but not quite as good as the conclusion of the passage it occurs in, that says,
And he knew, therefore, that all definitions of art are circular, and all untrue defintions of art ascribe to it a specific function.
The Noise of Time is a consummate masterpiece, read as the most pressing priority inside 24 hours that also included the usual weekend routine and Julian Barnes on this form is a consummate master. One wants such a book to continue for as long as it can while at the same time needing to finish it, note it, appreciate and admire it. Two contradictory impulses are in play together until the next conflict arises in which you either want to read it again or lend it to somebody else and insist they read it.
I never thought that my initial reservations would be dispelled quite so convincingly.