JULIAN BARNES The Noise of Time. Reviewed by Kurt Johnson
Barnes has made the leap across time, culture, language and artform to believably invoke the thoughts of a brilliant but troubled Soviet composer.
A composer, famous even beyond the razor-wire girdling the border of the Soviet Union, receives a bad review in Pravda, the official mouthpiece of the Communist Party. The review has enough grammatical mistakes to be plausibly written by Stalin, the Great Uncorrectable Helmsman. To save his wife and daughter from the humiliation of a midnight rousting, the composer packs all the belongings he will need for an extended interrogation and waits night after night by the apartment lift for the NKVD to come.
So begins the story of Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich as fictionalised by Julian Barnes in The Noise of Time. The story is true, but what is the value of truth in an epoch when truth, like everything else, is subservient to the Party?
Multiple biographies have been written about Shostakovich and Barnes acknowledges two of them as providing the scaffolding for his novella. Yet nonfiction quickly comes up against its limitations when dealing with the Great Terror. Totalitarianism invaded everything and controlled the public record. It also destroyed the private sphere, reducing its boundaries to one’s own head, and what reliable nonfiction can speculate on thoughts?
With this in mind The Noise of Time concerns itself with the sprawling warrens of Shostakovich’s anxiety-ridden interior. In the hands of a lesser writer this would be easy to botch and it’s difficult to imagine how Barnes made the leap across time, culture, language and artform to invoke so believably the thoughts of the brilliant but troubled Soviet composer. But he has. And this choice of authenticity over accuracy has paid off.
One aspect of Barnes’s Shostakovich that rings particularly true is how he experiences the ever-expanding tendrils of the totalitarian state’s influence on music:
When truth-speaking became impossible – because it led to immediate death – it had to be disguised. And so, truth’s disguise was irony. Because the tyrant’s ear is rarely tuned to it.
Shostakovich goes on to explain that irony through music is impossible, music could only be optimistic or pessimistic, and so his fate depends on official party critics and musicologists inventing their own political meanings. And so the composer’s life is precariously perched. In the end anything officially endorsed is labelled as abiding by Lenin’s ‘Art belongs to the people’ adage, while anything else is deemed bourgeois formalism. Which was the charge in Pravda.
Shostakovich is miraculously saved from the bad review at the last minute. He is called in for interrogation and accused of complicity in a plot to kill Stalin. When he returns for a second round of questioning, his interrogator has himself disappeared and the composer is free to go. Yet he has been denounced as an ‘enemy of the people’ until the caprice of authority decides his music can again be performed. From here Barnes touches on the core precept of life under Stalin – its opacity and its randomness. Shostakovich could just as easily be executed at any moment as he could return to favour and again be a heralded Soviet composer. It all depends on something as absurd as the political interpretation of a melody.
And so, for much of The Noise of Time the protagonist’s mind is furiously trying to develop a framework to provide logic to his predicament. It is impossible but still his mind churns. This ideological mining can yield gems of absurd humour thanks to that irony impossible in music:
In the old days, a child might pay for the sins of its father, or indeed mother. Nowadays, in the most advanced society on earth, the parents might pay for the sins of the child, along with uncles, aunts, cousins, in-laws, colleagues, friends and even the man who unthinkingly smiled at you as he came out of the lift at three in the morning. The system of retribution had been greatly improved, and was much more inclusive than it used to be.
He is rehabilitated and sent on a trip to the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace in the USA. Here the absurd humour reaches its climax as Shostakovich has to parrot official dogma and gives up reading his speech after the first page as the translator (read: Soviet minder) continues yammering on in English.
The entire trip is a series of humiliations for Shostakovich, yet humour also lies in the banality of the American Left’s good intentions, their instinct for apology and their complete inability to conceive of life under Stalinism. On a picket line at the Waldorf Astoria where the composers are holed up, a picketer walks with a sign ‘SHOSTAKOVICH – WE UNDERSTAND!’ Of course they cannot and Barnes here touches on a cornerstone of the Russian geopolitical character – the belief that Americans are, as a people, as naive as children.
If The Noise of Time skips a beat it is once Stalin dies and Khrushchev takes over. This is the time when ‘Power had become vegetarian’, though as Shostakovich notes wryly, ‘you could just as easily kill someone by stuffing vegetables down their throat …’
Naturally the mode of intense interior isolation required under Stalinism seems to lose its dramatic edge under the comparative freedom of Khrushchev. Here the book begins to sink into complacency and weariness, despite its protagonist receiving a never-ending parade of official honours. The narrative apex of this final act is when he is cajoled into joining the Communist Party, a necessary step for him to become head of the Union of Composers. This is a final betrayal of himself, yet it does not conjure the same high drama as the life and death struggle of earlier chapters.
At its best The Noise of Time evokes the frenetic paranoia of Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. Both books understood Stalinism as a thoroughly private affair that consequently could only be explored through fiction, and then by an extremely intimate, almost claustrophobic first-person narration. The regime’s victim is desperate to understand what cannot be understood.
Julian Barnes has achieved a considerable feat in creating a world and a protagonist that are utterly authentic. A fake would be easy to spot. By the novel’s end readers may feel they know far more about life under Stalinism than they might from ten works of nonfiction of comparative size.
Julian Barnes The Noise of Time Vintage 2017 PB 192pp $19.99
Kurt Johnson is a journalist and author of The Red Wake: A hybrid of travel, history and journalism, Random House, 2016.
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Good review Kurt. I enjoyed the book and the review. Barnes manages to portray the cringing propaganda of the whole Stalin era. The farce that was the visit to the US described with feeling, especially the humiliation of Shostakovitch.