Review -- The Noise of Time: A Novel by Julian Barnes

After decades of bans, smears, and threats by Stalin and his stooges, in 1949 Dmitri Shostakovich, was allowed to leave the Soviet Union—temporarily and under supervision, of course—to attend a peace conference in New York. The new leader of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev, was promising a more open and tolerant regime. Under Stalin Shostakovich had endured many public degradations and might look forward to a little relief; but now the Americans were about to take their turn and serve him the worst humiliation of his life. At the news conference a journalist working for the CIA was waiting with a list of questions designed to expose the repressive Soviet system. Shostakovich’s dignity would be collateral damage. The questions would force him to deny beliefs that went to the core of who he was, beliefs the whole world knew were dear to him, and to ignominiously spout the official line of the Communist Party.

Did he agree, he was asked, with the condemnation of Western music expounded daily in the Soviet press and by the Soviet government? Yes, said Shostakovich, lying, he did personally subscribe to those opinions. Did he support banning from Soviet concert halls the works of Hindemith, Schoenberg and Stravinsky? Here the knife dug deeper, because, in Shostakovich’s view, Stravinsky was the greatest composer of the twentieth century. Meekly he replied that, yes, he did personally subscribe to those opinions. Then came body blows. “And do you personally subscribe to the views expressed in your speech today about the music of Stravinsky?” Before he went on stage an apparatchik had handed him a speech to read condemning the works of Stravinsky. Hoping to indicate that he did not believe what he was saying, Shostakovich had read mechanically, as if to say, “See the mask I am wearing!” But now his attempt at irony was removed and everyone saw, even in the age of Khrushchev, the iron hand of Soviet Communism in the arts. “Yes,” he said, “I personally subscribe to such views.” Finally there was the question, “And do you personally subscribe to the views expressed about your music and that of other composers by Minister Zhdanov?” Zhdanov had been one of Shostakovich’s chief persecutors for many years, once comparing his music to the sound of a road drill. Poor Shostakovich, the great composer, his integrity in tatters, replied for all the world to hear, “Yes, I personally subscribe to the views expressed by Chairman Zhdanov.”  

Underlying The Noise of Time, Julian Barnes’s novel about Shostakovich, is the assumption of a standoff between art and power, between the transcendence of music and the ugliness of the real world. The final paragraph expresses it poetically. Shostakovich is drinking vodka with two other men. As they clink their glasses together, the composer observes, “A triad.” ”A sound,” adds Barnes, “that rang clear of the noise of time, and would outlive everyone and everything. And perhaps, finally, this was all that mattered.” It’s a nice flourish, climactic and uplifting, yet out of tune with the rest of the book, perhaps even a little precious. Barnes’s story depicts only the ugliness of Shostakovich’s life, only “the noise of time,” only the relentless depredations of the brutal tyranny. Endlessly kicked and spat upon, the composer endlessly cowers and complies. Even when the harsh Stalinist years are over, he submits, sacrificing one of his last remaining principles by joining what he called the “party that kills.” And he suffers the indignity of seeing articles published under his name without being consulted. What could have sustained him through all this misery? Barnes has little to say. Personal happiness is mentioned once, in connection with his third wife, whom he married at age 56. Some believe that she, age 27, was a perq for him arranged by the KGB.

The Noise of Time presents the unedifying spectacle of an artist with his neck firmly under the jackboot of a tyrant, not bravely resisting, not negotiating, not manoeuvring for space, but forever meek and fearful, suffering everything in silence. A last-minute tribute to the glory of art in the clinking of three glasses is a featherweight when balanced against the rest of the book.