The Noise of Time

by Julian Barnes Narrated by Daniel Philpott

Overview

In May 1937, a man in his early thirties waits by the lift of a Leningrad apartment block. He waits all through the night, expecting to be taken away to the `Big House.' Any celebrity he has known in the previous decade is no use to him now, and few who are taken to ever return.

Editorial Reviews

The Barnes & Noble Review

Night after night, in the year 1936, a man stands on the landing outside his Moscow apartment. Dressed for travel, with a small suitcase at his feet, he waits for the lift doors to open, " . . . for the sight of a uniform . . . and the clamp of fist on wrist." Across the city, terrified individuals keep a similar nocturnal vigil, knowing that in Stalin's Russia, "They always came for you in the middle of the night." Better to meet them than to be dragged from your bed. Particularly if you are the composer Dmitri Shostakovich, " . . . a meticulous man," living in a time of madness. Throughout Julian Barnes's meditative biographical novel, The Noise of Time, Shostakovich works in the midst of terror, heartbreak, and war. "He could always work," Barnes writes, "regardless of chaos and discomfort around him. That was his salvation."

Redemption is another matter. Shostakovich was often condemned for remaining in the USSR, denouncing fellow artists, and writing patriotic works on demand, none of which Barnes overlooks. "In all, he had won the Stalin Prize six times," we learn. "He also received the Order of Lenin at regular ten-year intervals . . . He swam in honors like a shrimp in shrimp-cocktail sauce. And he hoped to be dead by the time 1976 came around." Because the axe is always poised to fall, even on the lucky. Toward the end of his life, the composer observes, "They had come for him every twelve years," starting in 1936 when an ill-received opera made him "an enemy of the people." This is when Barnes's compressed narrative begins. Divided into three sections — prosaically titled On The Landing, On The Plane, and In The Car — the novel alights on three critical years: 1936, when Shostakovich's arrest, even execution, seems imminent; 1948, when he visits the USA as part of a Soviet delegation; and 1960, when he is forced to join the Communist Party. Inside this elegant frame, Barnes creates an impressionistic portrait of an astonishing mind confronting a monstrous era.

"Faces, names, memories . . . Fields of sunflowers . . . Sweat coming off a widow's peak . . . " Remembered characters and images flash across the novel's early pages while Shostakovich waits in the dark, his mind "skittering." In these abbreviated paragraphs, we can only glimpse a man who seems to keep his distance. And Barnes's allusive, epigrammatic style keeps us at arm's length as he dramatizes Shostakovich's life in a series of potent scenes and muted reflections. Brian Hall, in his superb 2008 novel, Fall of Frost, took a similarly oblique approach to Robert Frost, but Hall seemed to penetrate the poet's heart, whereas Barnes enters this composer's consciousness, it often seems, purely as an observer. (The other obvious comparison is with Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, whose theme echoes through The Noise of Time but whose labyrinthine structure could not be more different.)

Childhood, first love, three marriages, children. The Bolshevik Revolution, World War II, Stalinism. With cerebral precision, Barnes depicts a life encased by history and defined, from the outset, by music. "Like his sisters, he had first been put in front of a keyboard at the age of nine. And that was when the world became clear to him." In 1926, the premiere of his First Symphony brings the nineteen year-old Shostakovich not only fame but also the political scrutiny that shadows him until his death in 1975. By which time, Barnes imagines the composer's pessimism curdling into desolation when he instructs that " . . . the first movement of his Fifteenth Quartet should be played 'so that flies drop dead in mid-air, and the audience start leaving the hall in sheer boredom.' "

The novel is leavened throughout by this kind of self-mockery and ironic wit. Each New Year's Eve, for example, since "Paradise had been created, or would be created quite soon when . . . a few hundred thousand more saboteurs had been shot," Shostakovich makes the same toast: "That things don't get any better!" Elsewhere, a brief rumination on cigarettes, (interrogators favor Belomory, intellectuals Kazbeki) prompts an image of Stalin crumbling his own brand into his pipe, making his desk "a terrible mess of discarded paper and cardboard and ash," followed by this observation: "No one else would smoke a Herzegovina Flor in Stalin's presence — unless offered one, when they might slyly attempt to keep it unsmoked and afterward flourish it like a holy relic."

Prokofiev and Stravinsky materialize briefly and with startling clarity alongside legendary soldiers like Marshal Tukhachevsky, "The Red Napoleon," tortured and executed in 1937. For all its turmoil, however, Barnes's novel remains a quiet meditation. "Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time," he concludes. And the artist? Growing old and enduring the humiliation of fame and totalitarian favor, "What he hoped for was that death would liberate his music: liberate it from his life . . . his music would be . . . just music." The final note in this elegiac and ultimately affecting novel is the simple sound of three vodka glasses clinking, " . . . .a perfect triad" Shostakovich notes, as he and a companion, waiting on a railway platform in midwinter in the middle of war, raise a toast with a crippled beggar.

Anna Mundow, a longtime contributor to The Irish Times and The Boston Globe, has written for The Guardian, The Washington Post, and The New York Times, among other publications.

Reviewer: Anna Mundow

Publishers Weekly

03/14/2016
Reviewed by Anthony MarraDmitry Shostakovich, the renowned Russian composer and subject of Barnes’s magnificent biographical novel, purportedly declared near the end of his life, “The majority of my symphonies are tombstones.” The Noise of Time, then, is a journey into the shadows of Shostakovich’s personal cemetery, the Soviet Union at midcentury.We meet Shostakovich in 1936, at the onset of Stalin’s Great Purge, as he stands by the hallway elevator each night, awaiting his imminent arrest. It’s an absurd, desperate attempt to protect to his family by surrendering himself before the security forces reach his apartment. His opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk recently received a sharp rebuke in Pravda titled “Muddle Instead of Music,” which may have been written by Stalin himself, because “there were enough grammatical errors to suggest the pen of one whose mistakes could never be corrected.” In Stalin’s Russia, where even the most abstract of the fine arts are potent political expressions, and where one’s worth is determined by one’s work, this sort of criticism can serve as a death sentence.Shostakovich barely avoids arrest, and we catch up with him every 11 or 12 years. In 1949, he returns from a disastrous trip to New York City as a Soviet delegate to the Cultural and Scientific Congress for World Peace. In 1960, he is in the back of a chauffeured car, having committed moral suicide by becoming a party member. From these scenes of transition, the fragmented narrative delves into Shostakovich’s public collusions with and private condemnations of Soviet power. He emerges as a sympathetic, frail, and tragic hero whose self-castigations are far harsher than any judgments the reader will pass.It’s curious that a novel stretching across Shostakovich’s life would largely omit his experiences in the Second World War, particularly his Seventh “Leningrad” Symphony, which must be among the most mythologized concert premieres of the 20th century. But Barnes is more interested in the political than practical realities of composing. By focusing on Shostakovich’s compromises, rather than his compositions, The Noise of Time transcends the singular nature of artistic brilliance to become universal in its exploration of repression and resistance. “He had been as courageous as his nature allowed; but conscience was always there to insist that more courage could have been shown.” This is as close to self-forgiveness as Barnes’s Shostakovich comes. It’s not hard to imagine the sentiment would be shared by anyone who has conceded a portion of his or her soul to totalitarianism in exchange for the right to survive.Novels about artistic achievement rarely do justice to their subjects. What, really, can Irving Stone tell us about Michelangelo’s genius that the Sistine Chapel doesn’t already amply demonstrate? The Noise of Time is that rarity. It is a novel of tremendous grace and power, giving voice to the complex and troubled man whose music outlasted the state that sought to silence him. (May)Anthony Marra is the author of The Tsar of Love and Techno and A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (both from Hogarth).

From the Publisher

Exquisite.” —O Magazine

 “Stands in an honored literary tradition that includes such predecessors as Barnard Malamud’s The Fixer, Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son or this year’s Pulitzer Prize winner, The Sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen [and] another even more audacious tradition, one that includes J.M. Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg, Colm Tóibín’s The Master, and Kafka’s Leopards by Moacyr Scliar. . . . What can be more ambitious than a writer who seeks to capture the inner life of another great artist?” —Chauncy Mabe, The Miami Herald

“A tense and elegant study of terror, shame and cowardice, of a celebrated artist capitulating to power, yet on his own terms. . . . Barnes interweaves the painful and the sublime to achieve an epic orchestral effect.” —Tom Zelman, The Minneapolis Star Tribune

“A great short novel . . . thoughtful, humane and compassionate. . . . But its true beauty is in the impression it leaves of Shostakovich's distress and humanity. . . . The book is a meditation on the idea of character and integrity.” —Andre Alexis, The Globe and Mail

 “Elegiac and ultimately affecting. . . . With cerebral precision, Barnes depicts a life encased by history and defined, from the outset, by music.” —Anna Mundow, The Barnes & Noble Review

“As elegantly constructed as a concerto . . . another brilliant thought-provoker which explores the cost of compromise and how much confrontation and concession a man and his conscience can endure.” —Heller McAlpin, National Public Radio

“Barnes’s storytelling is phenomenal; Shostakovich, as tragic and anxious as he is, is utterly fascinating.” —Leslie Rieder, The Christian Science Monitor

“This story is truly amazing . . . an arc of human degradation without violence (the threat of violence, of course, everywhere). . . . The whole Kafka madhouse brought to life.”—Jeremy Denk, The New York Times Book Review

“Timely and arresting . . . deeply engaging . . . [it] leads us to places only a handful of novelists have the skill and the courage to go. . . . I can’t recall any other recent book which offers such a prismatic perspective on the tension between revolutionary discipline and artistic freedom.” —Askold Melnyczuk, The Boston Globe

“[An] ambitious Orwellian allegory about the plight of artists in totalitarian societies—and a Kafkaesque parable about a fearful man’s efforts to wrestle with a surreal reality, even as he questions his complicity with the system. . . . Barnes’s book internalizes these debates, turning them into conversations within Shostakovich’s own head. On one hand, defending his need to survive and protect his family; on the other, cursing himself as a cowardly worm.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“Elegiac and ultimately affecting. . . . With cerebral precision, Barnes depicts a life encased by history and defined, from the outset, by music.” —Anna Mundow, The Barnes & Noble Review

“Magnificent . . . Novels about artistic achievement rarely do justice to their subjects.  The Noise of Time is that rarity. It is a novel of tremendous grace and power, giving voice to the complex and troubled man whose music outlasted the state that sought to silence him.” —Anthony Marra, Publishers Weekly

“A great novel, Barnes's masterpiece—the particular and intimate details of the life under consideration beget questions of universal significance; the operation of power upon art, the limits of courage and endurance, the sometimes intolerable demands of personal integrity and conscience. This novel, like [The Sense of an Ending], gives us the breath of a whole life within the pages of a slim book.” —Alex Preston, The Guardian

“Undoubtedly one of Barnes’s best novels.” —Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Sunday Times

“The Noise of Time tells the story of Dmitri Shostakovich, the Russian composer both feted and condemned by the Soviet state during his lifetime; but it does so not in aridly “truthful” fashion, but in full, delighted knowledge of how little use facts are in determining the essence of human experience, let alone its intersection with history and politics … A complex meditation on the power, limitations and likely endurance of art.” —Alex Clark, Observer

“Barnes brilliantly captures the composer’s conflicted state of mind, which culminates in the chilling realization that ‘death was preferable to endless terror.’ … Packs an extraordinary emotional punch.” —Sebastian Shakespeare, Tatler

“[Barnes is] a master of the narrative sidestep… Not just a novel about music, but something more like a musical novel… The story itself is structured in three parts that come together like a broken chord.  It is a simple but brilliant device, and one that goes right to the heart of this novel.”—Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, The Times

“A novel of deceptive slenderness… Barnes has reinvented himself once again.” —Duncan White, Daily Telegraph

Library Journal

★ 04/01/2016
Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–75), considered by many the greatest Soviet Russian composer, wrote much of his music under exceedingly trying conditions. He lived at a time when incurring the disfavor of Soviet leader Stalin could land even musicians and poets in the gulag or worse. In his new novel, Man Booker Prize winner Barnes (The Sense of an Ending) details how for years the artist slept with a packed suitcase beside him each night should he hear that knock on the door. The author addresses his subject not chronologically but by emphasizing certain themes in his life: his insecurities, his relations with women and his several marriages, and his never-ending run-ins with Power—Barnes's term for the Soviet establishment. Even when his reputation was reestablished after Stalin's death, Shostakovich continued to experience confrontations with a Communist party determined to use him for its own ends. VERDICT Though his novel says comparatively little about Shostakovich's music, Barnes's fresh and distinctive approach to the composer's life highlights key aspects of his character and lets us believe we've read an actual biography. This engaging work is well recommended to readers of literary fiction as well as aficionados of Soviet culture and history. [See Prepub Alert, 2/21/16.]—Edward Cone, New York

Kirkus Reviews

2016-02-11
A fictional treatment of the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) and his long history of humiliation and persecution under Soviet rule."Muddle instead of music," read the headline in Pravda after the 1936 performance of Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Under Stalin's rule, this signified more than just a bad review—it was a loudly broadcasted command to stick to the Communist Party line and, amid purges and gulags, tantamount to a death threat. This brief novel from the Man Booker Prize-winning Barnes (The Sense of an Ending, 2011, etc.) captures the cloud of fear the composer lived under until his death, regardless of whether he was in or out of favor with "Power" with a capital P. He delivered speeches he didn't write that made claims he didn't agree with, and he acceded to demands he allow a tutor to school him in Soviet doctrine, while laboring to compose music that wouldn't offend but still indulged his creative spirit. All of this took a toll on him, of course, and Barnes captures his subject's stress and dark humor with his signature grace. There's plenty of sharp imagery depicting Shostakovich's bind: "He swam in honours like a shrimp in shrimp-cocktail sauce" captures the putrescence of acclaim that's a function of politics; elsewhere, he conceives of life as "the cat that dragged the parrot downstairs by its tail; his head banged against every step." But this portrait also feels too restrained at times. While Barnes willingly gets into Shostakovich's head when it comes to his painful submission, he generally elides how he composed music under those circumstances. That softens the sense of artistic loss in a story that might have sent a stronger signal about what happens to creativity in repressive circumstances. A moody, muted composition about art under the thumb of tyranny.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171568030
Publisher:	W. F. Howes Ltd
Publication date:	01/28/2016
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

And so, it had all begun, very precisely, on the morning of the 28th of January 1936, in Arkhangelsk. He had been invited to perform his first piano concerto with the local orchestra under Viktor Kubatsky; the two of them had also played his new cello sonata. It had gone well. The next morning he went to the railway station to buy a copy of Pravda. He had looked at the front page briefly, then turned to the next two. It was, as he would later put it, the most memorable day of his life. And a date he chose to mark each year until his death.

Except that—as his mind obstinately argued back—nothing ever begins as precisely as that. It began in different places, and in different minds. The true starting point might have been his own fame. Or his opera. Or it might have been Stalin, who, being infallible, was therefore responsible for everything. Or it could have been caused by something as simple as the layout of an orchestra. Indeed, that might finally be the best way of looking at it: a composer first denounced and humiliated, later arrested and shot, all because of the layout of an orchestra.

If it all began elsewhere, and in the minds of others, then perhaps he could blame Shakespeare, for having written Macbeth. Or Leskov for Russifying it into Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. No, none of that. It was, self-evidently, his own fault for having written the piece that offended. It was his opera’s fault for being such a success—at home and abroad—it had aroused the curiosity of the Kremlin. It was Stalin’s fault because he would have inspired and approved the Pravda editorial—perhaps even written it himself: there were enough grammatical errors to suggest the pen of one whose mistakes could never be corrected. It was also Stalin’s fault for imagining himself a patron and connoisseur of the arts in the first place. He was known never to miss a performance of Boris Godunov at the Bolshoi. He was almost as keen on Prince Igor and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sadko. Why should Stalin not want to hear this acclaimed new opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk?

And so, the composer was instructed to attend a performance of his own work on the 26th of January 1936. Comrade Stalin would be there; also Comrades Molotov, Mikoyan and Zhdanov. They took their places in the government box. Which had the misfortune to be situated immediately above the percussion and the brass. Sections which in Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk were not scored to behave in a modest and self-effacing fashion.

He remembered looking across from the director’s box, where he was seated, to the government box. Stalin was hidden behind a small curtain, an absent presence to whom the other distinguished comrades would sycophantically turn, knowing that they were themselves observed. Given the occasion, both conductor and orchestra were understandably nervous. In the entr’acte before Katerina’s wedding, the woodwind and brass suddenly took it upon themselves to play more loudly than he had scored. And then it was like a virus spreading through each section. If the conductor noticed, he was powerless. Louder and louder the orchestra became; and every time the percussion and brass roared fortissimo beneath them—loud enough to knock out windowpanes—Comrades Mikoyan and Zhdanov would shudder theatrically, turn to the figure behind the curtain and make some mocking remark. When the audience looked up to the government box at the start of the fourth act, they saw that it had been vacated.

After the performance, he had collected his briefcase and gone straight to the Northern Station to catch the train for Arkhangelsk. He remembered thinking that the government box had been specially reinforced with steel plates, to protect its occupants against assassination. But that there was no such cladding to the director’s box. He was not yet thirty, and his wife was five months pregnant at the time.
 
1936: he had always been superstitious about leap years. Like many people, he believed that they brought bad luck.

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Those who did not know him, and who followed music only from a distance, probably imagined that this had been his first setback. That the brilliant nineteen-year-old whose First Symphony was quickly taken up by Bruno Walter, then by Toscanini and Klemperer, had known nothing but a clear, clean decade of success since that premiere in 1926. And such people, perhaps aware that fame often leads to vanity and self-importance, might open their Pravda and agree that composers could easily stray from writing the kind of music people wanted to hear. And further, since all composers were employed by the state, that it was the state’s duty, if they offended, to intervene and draw them back into greater harmony with their audience. This sounded entirely reasonable, didn’t it?

Except that they had practised sharpening their claws on his soul from the beginning: while he was still at the Conservatoire a group of Leftist fellow students had tried to have him dismissed and his stipend removed. Except that the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians and similar cultural organisations had campaigned from their inception against what he stood for; or rather, what they thought he stood for. They were determined to break the bourgeois stranglehold on the arts. So workers must be trained to become composers, and all music must be instantly comprehensible and pleasing to the masses. Tchaikovsky was decadent, and the slightest experimentation condemned as “formalism.”

Except that as early as 1929 he had been officially denounced, told that his music was “straying from the main road of Soviet art,” and sacked from his post at the Choreographic Technical College. Except that in the same year Misha Kvadri, the dedicatee of his First Symphony, became the first of his friends and associates to be arrested and shot.

Except that in 1932, when the Party dissolved the independent organisations and took charge of all cultural matters, this had resulted not in a taming of arrogance, bigotry and ignorance, rather in a systematic concentration of them. And if the plan to take a worker from the coal face and turn him into a composer of symphonies did not exactly come to pass, something of the reverse happened. A composer was expected to increase his output just as a coal miner was, and his music was expected to warm hearts just as a miner’s coal warmed bodies. Bureaucrats assessed musical output as they did other categories of output; there were established norms, and deviations from those norms.
 
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At Arkhangelsk railway station, opening Pravda with chilled fingers, he had found on page three a headline identifying and condemning deviance: muddle instead of music. He determined at once to return home via Moscow, where he would seek advice. On the train, as the frozen landscape passed, he reread the article for the fifth and sixth times. Initially, he had been shocked as much for his opera as for himself: after such a denunciation, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk could not possibly continue at the Bolshoi. For the last two years, it had been applauded everywhere—from New York to Cleveland, from Sweden to Argentina. In Moscow and Leningrad, it had pleased not just the public and the critics, but also the political commissars. At the time of the 17th Party Congress its performances had been listed as part of the Moscow district’s official output, which aimed to compete with the production quotas of the Donbass coal miners.

All this meant nothing now: his opera was to be put down like a yapping dog which had suddenly displeased its master. He tried to analyse the different elements of the attack as clearheadedly as possible. First, his opera’s very success, especially abroad, was turned against it. Only a few months before, Pravda had patriotically reported the work’s American premiere at the Metropolitan Opera. Now the same paper knew that Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk had only succeeded outside the Soviet Union because it was “non-political and confusing,” and because it “tickled the perverted taste of the bourgeois with its fidgety, neurotic music.”

Next, and linked to this, was what he thought of as government-box criticism, an articulation of those smirks and yawns and sycophantic turnings towards the hidden Stalin. So he read how his music “quacks and grunts and growls”; how its “nervous, convulsive and spasmodic” nature derived from jazz; how it replaced singing with “shrieking.” The opera had clearly been scribbled down in order to please the “effete,” who had lost all “wholesome taste” for music, preferring “a confused stream of sound.” As for the libretto, it deliberately concentrated on the most sordid parts of Leskov’s tale: the result was “coarse, primitive and vulgar.”

But his sins were political as well. So the anonymous analysis by someone who knew as much about music as a pig knows about oranges was decorated with those familiar, vinegar-soaked labels. Petit-bourgeois, formalist, Meyerholdist, Leftist. The composer had written not an opera but an anti-opera, with music deliberately turned inside out. He had drunk from the same poisoned source which produced “Leftist distortion in painting, poetry, teaching and science.” In case it needed spelling out—and it always did—Leftism was contrasted with “real art, real science and real literature.”

“Those that have ears will hear,” he always liked to say. But even the stone deaf couldn’t fail to hear what “Muddle Instead of Music” was saying, and guess its likely consequences. There were three phrases which aimed not just at his theoretical misguidedness but at his very person. “The composer apparently never considered the problem of what the Soviet audience looks for and expects in music.” That was enough to take away his membership in the Union of Composers. “The dan­ger of this trend to Soviet music is clear.” That was enough to take away his ability to compose and perform. And finally: “It is a game of clever ingenuity that may end very badly.” That was enough to take away his life.

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