When a Man Booker Prize winning author takes a hiatus from novel-writing for five years and then re-enters the scene with a fictional biography of a Russian composer, he is bound to receive some attention, regardless of whether it is welcome or not. In his latest novel, The Noise of Time, Julian Barnes, who was awarded the Booker Prize for The Sense of an Ending in 2011, creates his particular version of the life of Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich (1906-1975), one of the most influential composers working in the 20th century. In an author’s note following the novel, Barnes credits the work of historical biographer Elizabeth Wilson as having both inspired and implicitly supported his writing, though with characteristic audacity he quips: “this is my book, not hers; and if you haven’t liked mine, then read hers.”

“Liked” is not a word that one may comfortably associate with this text. It taunts, eludes, evades, and ultimately finds refuge simply in its author’s stream of consciousness. At the risk of belabouring the metaphor I will add that this is the type of novel that requires, in fact demands, a total immersion of the reader’s concentration within its vertiginous depths. Those expecting a straightforward, linear biography (albeit a creative one) will be thoroughly disappointed. Barnes writes from the point of view of Shostakovich’s intimate thoughts and deeply visceral reactions to both his own talent as well as his ongoing struggle with Soviet politics of his time.

Having gained considerable recognition as early as when he was in his 20s under the influential patronage of the powerful military leader Marshal Tukhachevsky, the protagonist fell out of favour the moment Joseph Stalin decided that Tukhachevsky was getting too big for his boots. While that may have indeed been the case, Shostakovich consistently and bitterly laments that the Soviet regime of the 1930s developed strong prejudices against his formalist and experimental style of composition considering even the great Tchaikovsky to be “decadent, and the slightest experimentation condemned as ‘formalism’.”

Julian Barnes’s latest work is an absorbing fictional biography of the composer Shostakovich

The book is divided into three sections and the first dwells at length on how Stalin attended Shostakovich’s famous opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk in 1926. Violence and adultery are the main themes of this work, and while even the protagonist admits that it was unlikely that Stalin would have actively disliked the piece, his henchmen certainly did, and the opera was banned for decades by the government. While Stalin’s aides’ actual reactions remained characteristically veiled, they used the composer’s friendship with Tukhachevsky against him, and had him summoned for extensive interrogation. Only a stroke of luck, that resulted in the interrogator himself being whisked away mysteriously before he could incarcerate the composer, led to Shostakovich’s uneasy liberation.

Merged with such subtly harrowing accounts are well-sketched episodes of the composer’s childhood and youth. His mother, Sofia, a formidable widow, clearly terrified the boy, so much so that he was never able to shake off her dominating influence. Perhaps it was this that led to him choosing a spouse as pleasant and pliable as Nina “Nita” Varzar in 1932, by whom he had two children — a girl named Galina and a boy, Maxim. Following her death several years later, he remarried twice, but neither his second wife Margarita nor his third, Irina, understood him as well as his first wife. Yet there are odd moments in the novel, both early as well as much later, when he muses about his first love Tanya, who captivated him during his teenage years. Such musings, be they about romance, politics, music, or society, are typical of the dreamy stance the protagonist adopts throughout the novel, making the writing hard to follow in spite of the book’s manageable length of under 200 pages.

“He himself had never been tempted by a life abroad. He was a Russian composer who lived in Russia. He declined to imagine any alternative. Though he had experienced his own brief moment of Western fame. In New York he had gone to a pharmacy for some aspirin. Ten minutes after he left, an assistant was seen fixing a sign in the window. It read DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH SHOPS HERE. He no longer expected to be killed — that fear was long in the past. But being killed had never been the worst. In January 1948 his old friend Solomon Mikhoels, director of the Moscow Jewish Theatre, was murdered on Stalin’s orders. The day the news came out, he had spent five hours being hectored by Zhdanov for distorting Soviet reality, failing to celebrate the nation’s glorious victories and eating out of the hands of its enemies. Afterwards, he went straight to Mikhoels’s apartment. He had embraced his friend’s daughter and her husband. Then, standing with his back to the crowd of silent, fearful mourners, with his face almost pushing into the bookcase, he said to them, in a quiet, clear voice, ‘I envy him.’ He meant it: death was preferable to endless terror.” — Excerpt from the book

Barnes is good at creating atmosphere and ambience, which might explain why the spectre of Stalin consistently haunted the composer, even years after the lucky escape to which I refer above. For him Stalin personified power to such an extent that, equating his influence with the workings of the regime, Shostakovich addresses “Power” as a personification frequently in the book. For example, Barnes writes: “Power had talked to him through newspapers, publicly, and had whispered in his ear, privately. Recently, Power had humiliated him, taken away his livelihood, ordered him to repent. Power had told him how it wanted him to work, how it wanted him to live. Now it was hinting that perhaps, on consideration, it might not want him to live any more.”

Though Shostakovich was well aware that Nikita Khrushchev, whom he amusingly refers to as “Nikita the Corncob,” was no saint, one never gets the impression that the Cold War leader could hold a candle to the impressively terrorising influence that Stalin (the “Great Helmsman”) had wielded over Shostakovich. Nevertheless, in spite of all his conflicts with authority, the composer received three Orders of Lenin and six Stalin prizes over the course of his fluctuating, but brilliant career. Perhaps one of the reasons that the tone of the novel comes across as erratic and unsteady is because Shostakovich was a deeply sensitive person who never really felt anchored and in control in any social milieu.

While one would hesitate, based on Barnes’ work, to label the protagonist as deeply nationalistic, the point that he regards his country as superior to, and more refined than others such as the United States, is glaringly evident. While attending the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace in 1949 in New York he claims that he had not expected the country to be full of “capitalists in stovepipe hats and Stars and Stripes waistcoats marching down Fifth Avenue and trampling underfoot the starving proletariat.” In 1960 he was prevailed upon by the government to accept the chairmanship of the USSR Union of Composers; the regime slyly lifted the ban on Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk in return for his joining the Communist Party. Although this was abhorrent to Shostakovich, his conformist reactions, especially later in the novel, hardly come across as surprising, since the entire book reflects a pattern of twisted barter and exchange between him and the regime that obsessively oversaw his every move.

Appreciating The Noise of Time depends on patience, and savouring Barnes’ witty, but emphatically self-indulgent writing is a matter of acquired taste. He succeeds in providing an abstract portrait of the inner life and workings of a complex and tortured man. Those who try too hard to make sense of the frequent ramblings and convoluted expressions that abound in the text will not be able to see the whole picture. The point at which Barnes’s own genius dovetails with Shostakovich’s lies in the philosophical acceptance that results from their both having “lived long enough to have been dismayed” by themselves, a worldly-wise resignation which leads to their being able to capture reality in a genuinely creative form.

The reviewer is assistant professor of Social Sciences and Liberal Arts at the Institute of Business Administration, Karachi.

The Noise of Time
(NOVEL)
By Julian Barnes
Jonathan Cape, UK
ISBN 978-1910702604
184pp.