The Noise Of Time by Julian Barnes

The Noise Of Time by Julian Barnes is a novel. Its subject is real. The person lived a famous life. This, however, is neither memoir nor biography. It is not a critique. Neither does it claim to be fact, though the factual record and history form the spine of the work. In some ways, Julian Barnes is revisiting the territory of Flaubert's Parrot, but in a more intense, completely personal way, without the potential distraction of a fictional author as a go-between.

The Noise Of Time deals with the life and work of a composer. Novels about music tend to miss their intended mark. Carpenter's The Lost Steps and McEwan's Amsterdam might quality as exceptions. But here, Julian Barnes approaches from an original angle. The music is there, but its existence is assumed, its generation simply a part of its creator's life. The author does not need to describe every meal that sustains the life of one who needs to eat, and so Julian Barnes can safely by-pass the process by which a compulsive composer creates. In The Noise Of Time it is the art's context, political, social and historical, that drives the plot and thus constructs the character of the undoubtedly real composer.

The composer is Dmitri Shostakovich, prodigy, genius, icon of the state, embodiment in sound of the revolution. Or was he?  Obviously not. Why obviously?  The world is aware of his achievements - fifteen each of symphony and string quartet, two concertos each for piano, cello and violin, chamber and choral music, ballet scores and a couple of operas, including that particular opera, that infamous opera.

Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk is perhaps our starting point, because it, along with the Fourth Symphony marked the start of the composer's brush with state power that was Stalin's State, the Power. This music, to bureaucrat and dictator alike, represented formalism, the tendency of the artist to inhabit the self rather than society, and write for an elite rather than a public. We are all guilty.

To illustrate an artist's life in conflict with authoritarian expectation, Julian Barnes adopts a particular and unexpected style. It is a choice that is very hard to bring off, but Julian Barnes does it with apparent ease. Via a third person narrative, more suited to linear narrative or formal record rather than episodic reflection, we enter the passing thoughts that flit through the composer's mind as he faces the immediate dangers that confront him. Initially this grates. It seems to fall between first person narrative reliving experience and a detached historical record. But then, quickly, a reader realizes that any artist inevitably becomes alienated from published work, because it becomes the property of those who claim it for their own experience. It is the artist, often the composer, who becomes an internal third person, someone who already exists for posterity, rather than the present. The work is already complete, but posterity has yet to be created, and in whose image will that be?

The novel runs across three large chapters, entitled On the landing, On the plane and In the car. These apparently momentary encounters with Dmitri Shostakovich occur at significant points of his brushes with authority and power. These are moments when he must reflect on what it means to be an artist, a servant of the state, a husband, father, Russian, a hero of the people and a coward, all alongside the pressure of staying alive. Occasionally, apparently, he composes and plays music.

Because of Julian Barnes's stylistic choice of third person narrative married to an implied record of the character's own thought, the text can inhabit the external world of historical fact and Shostakovich's internal doubts simultaneously. The reader, like the artist, can cope with a third person who behaves like a first. And so, when the text also includes elements of dialogue to describe the composer's intermittent brushes with Power, we feel we are there alongside the artist fearing for his life, choosing his words as carefully as he has chosen his notes both to project  himself and to protect himself.

Thus, via a short but intense novel, Julian Barnes presents a rounded portrait of the artist, a flavour of his times and its history and an appreciation of the composer's achievement. There are even musical techniques built into the fabric of the piece. Leitmotifs, apparently minor details or asides, reappear. Oranges and pigs, a Mercedes for Prokofiev, an imagined Red Beethoven are some of the germs that reappear throughout the text, just like D-S-C-H permeates the composer's output, perhaps as a means of communicating when he was writing for himself, and not following dictates.

The Noise Of Time is the kind of book that passes quickly, but whose impression and influence will be long-lasting. Just like its subject.