In the past couple of years, Julian Barnes has become a ‘buy him when you see him’ author. A few of his books—Levels of Life, Sense of an Ending, Arthur and George—stick with me, and I recommend them regularly. I thought I knew what Barnes was about, but The Noise of Time threw me for a loop.
The book is about three episodes in the life of Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich, in soviet Russia under Stalin and Khrushchev. Shostakovich went from national treasure to pariah and back, blown by the political winds of the moment. At one point he was certain that he was about to be taken to the gulag, only for his interrogator to face the gulag instead. For some time he would pack a bag each night and wait by the elevator for the people who were coming to arrest him.
I’m not a qualified judge of these things, but Barnes’ Shostakovich felt Russian to me, with gallows humour, irony and cynicism. The story itself is interesting — As a non-classical music guy, Shostakovich and his crew were new to me—I spent a bunch of time diving into Russian music under Stalin to keep up.
Knowing what I was embarking on would have made the book an easier read. The book isn’t long, but without context it took a while to understand the setting and characters.
Even then, I found the story hard to connect with. Barnes’ writing is gorgeous as usual, but there is something kind of sluggish about The Noise of Time — the protagonist spends pages almost performing thoughtfulness. There are times where it seemed to be gaining momentum, only for some kind of essay-style digression to hit the brakes.
The New York Times review said it better than me. It’s a smart book, but it sometimes really drags:
Is this how a man thinks, in the throes of mortal fear for himself and for his family? Or does it sound a tad like a novelist contemplating a man contemplating these things?
The Noise of Time isn’t the first of Barnes’ books that I didn’t love (that was Elizabeth Finch), but it was the first one that I almost put down. Maybe it’s my ignorance of Russian composers, my Barnes blind spot, or just bad timing, I’ll still grab the next Barnes I spot.
Further Reading
The Guardian on Musicians in the Time of Stalin
