NYTDBR: Julian Barnes's 'The Noise of Time,' the Inner Shostakovich

[Frank Forman]

Review: Julian Barnes's 'The Noise of Time,' the Inner Shostakovich
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/03/books/review-julian-barness-the-noise-of-time-the-inner-shostakovich.html

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

The Noise of Time
By Julian Barnes
201 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $25.95.

On Jan. 26, 1936, Joseph Stalin attended a performance of Dmitri
Shostakovich's much-acclaimed opera "Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk" at the
Bolshoi Theater in Moscow, and the composer was disturbed to see
that the Soviet leader and his government companions abruptly left
their box before the final act. Two days later, there appeared in
Pravda a scathing denunciation of the evening under the headline
"Muddle Instead of Music." The review castigated Shostakovich's
opera as tickling "the perverted taste of the bourgeois with its
fidgety, neurotic music."

It was, people speculated, an artistic death warrant (if not the
real thing) and possibly penned by Stalin himself. The composers'
union quickly condemned the opera, too, and onetime supporters began
berating Shostakovich in speeches and statements.

Shostakovich was so convinced that the secret police would come to
take him away in the middle of the night that he reportedly kept a
packed suitcase ready for his arrest.

Julian Barnes makes this traumatic event central to his
fictionalized portrait of Shostakovich in his ambitious but
claustrophobic new novel, "The Noise of Time." It's a book that
attempts to turn the composer's complex relationship with the Soviet
authorities into an 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.

In the book that first brought him to prominence, "Flaubert's
Parrot" (1985), Mr. Barnes also created a novel around the biography
of a prominent artist. But whereas he used a collagelike technique
in that volume to give us glimpses of his hero from a variety of
angles, he opts here to try to take us into Shostakovich's own mind
--a suffocating place, it turns out, which is part of the problem.

Through the years, there have been intense debates over both the
enduring importance of that composer's music (some sing his praises,
while others regard him as second-rate, hardly fit to be mentioned
alongside the likes of Prokofiev, never mind Stravinsky) and his
stance toward the Soviet regime. Some have depicted Shostakovich as
a coward who caved to Stalin after the "Lady Macbeth" episode, and
who compromised his aesthetic and moral principles; others have
defended him as a brave dissident who lived under constant fear of
persecution and who cleverly smuggled a message of defiance into his
music.

Mr. 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, who compromised all his principles,
going so far as to denounce his hero, Stravinsky, as a deviant
modernist. One minute, telling himself that he has cleverly used
irony to subvert his apparent embrace of the regime's prescription
of optimistic, old-fashioned music; the next, filled with
self-disgust at having allowed himself to be displayed as a
figurehead of Soviet values at a cultural conference in the United
States or being bullied into joining the party.

By internalizing these debates, Mr. Barnes avoids the polarized
either-or, black-or-white characterizations of Shostakovich as noble
dissident or spineless government patsy, but he also traps us inside
the composer's mind, where we soon tire of the narcissistic musings
and self-pitying rationalizations. Being a hero, he thinks, requires
only a moment of courage "when you took out the gun, threw the bomb,
pressed the detonator, did away with the tyrant and with yourself as
well." Being a coward, in contrast, meant a lifetime of anticipating
"the next occasion when you would have to make excuses for yourself,
dither, cringe, reacquaint yourself with the taste of rubber boots
and the state of your own fallen, abject character." And yet he
accepts the perks granted by the government to its obedient and
favored citizen-artists--a nice apartment, a dacha, a car and
driver, servants, fame.

In recent books like "The Lemon Table" and "The Sense of an Ending,"
Mr. Barnes has become increasingly preoccupied with characters
looking back over the receding vistas of their lives. Here, he has
tried to echo Shostakovich's work with an aphoristic, irony-laden
style of his own. His composer is so given to bellyaching and
navel-gazing, however, that the novel gains power and resonance when
it steps outside its hero's head, and instead uses Shostakovich's
story to probe such favorite themes as the relativity of history and
the subjectivity of experience (the same themes that animated
earlier Barnes novels like "The Porcupine" and "A History of the
World in 10½ Chapters"), and to chronicle the absurdities that
artists suffer under totalitarianism.

Mr. Barnes's Shostakovich reads a speech recanting his own work; he
should have known better than to write a symphony that acknowledged
the tragedies of war, when any good Soviet citizen knew that war was
glorious. And he promises to renounce formalism and "unhealthy
individualism," and instead write melodic music for the Soviet
people. He submits to lessons in Marxism-Leninism from a tutor--a
sociologist--and agrees to hang a portrait of Stalin in his study.
He reads articles that appear under his name to find out what he was
thinking.

Eventually, Shostakovich hopes, time will liberate his music:
"History, as well as biography, would fade," Mr. Barnes writes.
"Perhaps one day Fascism and Communism would be merely words in
textbooks. And then, if it still had value--if there were still
ears to hear--his music would be ... just music."