Julian Barnes has written important novels, from Flaubert’s Parrot (1984) to The Sense of an Ending (2011), as well as much nonfiction. Some of it has been great; some of it, inevitably, a bit less so. But all of it is the product of a subtle, searching, incisive, and witty mind, always riveting reading.
The Noise of Time is such a book, a novel about the composer Dmitri Shostakovich and, as Yehudi Menuhin put it, “the tragic horror of a trapped genius” under Stalinism. A historical novel, then, about someone who died in 1975, whom many of the living knew and remember. Not someone from the usual more distant past, about whom one freely writes from scraps or scratch.
But Shostakovich? About him, as well as by him, there are reams available—even in English, never mind Russian. Barnes has surely read it all, or had it read to him in translation by others, chiefly Elizabeth Wilson, whose Shostakovich: A Life Remembered (1994) was a prime source, as were conversations with her, pointing out arcane material, correcting errors, and reading the typescript. That Barnes also incorporated gleanings from the unreliable Testimony (1979) of Solomon Volkov and scoured books about Stalin, Prokofiev, Stravinsky, and heaven knows how many others is all to his credit, as is his ability to incorporate it seamlessly into a comparatively brief novel.
It comes to us in his favorite form of three sections, within which are shorter and longer episodes, reflections, meditations. Sometimes these are scarcely more than aphorisms, such as “From now on there would be only two types of composer: those who were alive and frightened; and those who were dead.” Shostakovich is quoted: “Even if they cut off both my hands, I shall continue to write music with a pen in my mouth.”
There are four things that Julian Barnes does sovereignly. First, entering into the mind of the timid, justly scared composer. Second, rendering conversations, of which there is little or no detailed record, with wonderful, witty, or scary imagination. Third, re-creating the Stalinist and post-Stalinist eras in an account of unimpugnable, tragic (or sometimes tragicomic) veracity. And fourth, fusing it all into the seamless fabric of a novel.
There are brief but telling evocations of parents and childhood. There is the torrid premarital affair with Tanya Glivenko and the marriages: first to the good, though erratic and prematurely dead, Nita; the third, to the devoted Irina; and in-between, Shostakovich’s second marriage, barely worth mentioning. There are the two Shostakovich children, Maxim and Galya, interesting in themselves but dealt with cursorily here. There is, in great detail, the fascinating, terrifying relationship with Stalin himself, unpredictably hostile or almost frighteningly humorous. There are other politicians and composers, from the mutually-admiring-but-not-quite-friendly relationship with Sergei Prokofiev to that with the contemptible, untalented, and envious Stalin sycophant Tikhon Khrennikov.
There are dreadful, enervating encounters with Power, mostly in three very different duologues with its various emissaries. Altogether, the story is a struggle against (yet accommodation with) Power, comparable to Death in a medieval mystery play, but unfortunately real in Stalin’s kingdom. Above all, there are the absorbing interior monologues of the victim, who is eventually vindicated but remains imperiled. There are curious incidents, actual or feared, and devastating vignettes: Shostakovich, lying awake night after night by an elevator, a small leather case with necessaries rubbing against his leg, ready for the secret policemen to emerge and cart him off—to prison, to exile, or a bullet in the back of the head?
Barnes’s technique is flawless, starting with a magnified view of telling detail, made keener by the ambidextrous talent of novelist and critical essayist, shuttling between close-ups and long shots. Much is made of certain haunting refrains—”All he knew was that this was the worst time,” or the Russian proverb “Life is not a walk across a field”—and there are speculations as well:
There are recurring incidents, like motifs in music: Stalin and his retinue walking out on Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk; the notorious Pravda editorial “Muddle Instead of Music,” which was to prohibit and inhibit so many composers, for so long. There are striking descriptions of what sustained Shostakovich through his tribulations: irony, the laughter under the subservient lie. And yet—
Especially interesting are the observations about the Great Cultural and Scientific Congress for Peace at the Waldorf-Astoria, a piece of flagrant Soviet propaganda the unhappy Shostakovich was compelled to attend. No less interesting are other incidents and accidents that reverberate throughout the story, and always the witty, ominous irony: “Writers were condemned on page one of Pravda, composers on page three. Two pages apart. And yet it was not nothing: it could make the difference between death and life.” There are wonderful passages about music. And in the end, Shostakovich does emerge a hero, although this, too, must be taken with grains of irony.
John Simon is an author and critic in New York.
