Julian Barnes' 'The Noise of Time': A troubled composer in the shadow of Russia
In Julian Barnes' new novel, Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich considers the two types of composers in the Soviet Union: dead ones and frightened ones.
The Noise of Time
By Julian Barnes
Knopf. 224 pp. $25.95
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Reviewed By Jim Higgins
nolead ends In Julian Barnes' new novel, Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich considers the two types of composers in the Soviet Union: dead ones and frightened ones.
Call Shostakovich one of the latter. His music is played around the world, but he also stands by the elevator in his fifth-floor apartment many nights, a valise packed with his favorite cigarettes, in case he is arrested by the NKVD.
The late composer (1906-75) is having a literary moment. The Shostakovich revived by Barnes, decorated author of The Sense of an Ending, Arthur & George, and Flaubert's Parrot, would laugh at any suggestion that he was a hero: "He had been as courageous as his nature allowed; but conscience was always there to insist that more courage could have been shown," he thinks.
Though The Noise of Time is not a spy story, the haunted Shostakovich whom Barnes depicts might feel at home in a Graham Greene or John le Carré novel. Rarely does Barnes' Shostakovich take a breath without fearing Power, the name he uses to conceptualize the Soviet apparatus, or wrangling with his conscience.
On his bedside table, the composer, baptized but no believer, keeps a postcard of Titian's painting The Tribute Money, depicting Jesus considering the coin with Caesar's image. Shostakovich tries to render unto the Soviet Power what must be rendered, only to realize the state wanted everything.
His troubles begin in earnest with the premiere of his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtensk, which Stalin attends and dislikes. Pravda denounces it, declaring that it "tickled the perverted taste of the bourgeois with its fidgety, neurotic music." This leads to years of penance and political rehabilitation for Shostakovich, and effectively destroys his ability to continue composing operas. Power wants him to write more optimistic tunes like his early "Song of the Counterplan"; the composer does what he must in his film scores to satisfy the apparatchiks, but his genius lies elsewhere.
As the reluctant leader of an official delegation to the United States, Shostakovich is required to read a speech denouncing his artistic hero, Stravinsky - and to confirm that denouncement when questioned by a CIA stooge. Later, he tells a musical friend that was the worst moment of his life.
Whether mining Shostakovich's own writings or imagining these brilliant lines into being, Barnes depicts a troubled man and artist, an ironist and self-declared neurotic, at peace only when composing music.
His brooding Shostakovich offers drive-by commentary on other boldface names of his time, such as Picasso ("How easy it was to be a Communist when you weren't living under Communism!") and the Great Leader and Helmsman himself, Stalin (portrayed in a phone conversation that would fit nicely in either 1984 or Catch-22). Glimpses of and reflections on Shostakovich's messy love life (an early experiment in free love turned out less free than he might have imagined) and his care for his children thicken Barnes' succinct portrait.
This review originally appeared in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.