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The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes: book review



The Noise of Time (2016) is a semi-biographical account of Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich, and is set in his Moscow apartment block, commencing in May 1937.

Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich, born on 25 September 1906, is 31 years old, with a wife, Nita, and a one-year old daughter Galina. He has stability and regularity in his life. Shostakovich is a famous musician, so famous he buys himself a scrapbook and then ‘fills it with insulting articles about himself.’

The previous year, 1936, a leap year, Shostakovich had ‘committed a great fault’ in writing a piano concerto called Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. It is banned under the Cult of Personality.

Nevertheless he is a celebrity, a star pianist and composer – he was, until three days ago. Now he is standing by an elevator, with an overnight bag, expecting to be detained, interrogated, and taken to the ‘Big House’ where ‘few who are taken to the Big House ever return.’ He is nervous, obsessive, fearful, suicidal.

By 1948 – another leap year – he is still with his wife and two children: they now also have a son Maxim. In his family life, both optimism and pessimism co-exist. But was the trauma of 1936 over? He continues to compose music, for ‘Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time.’ But who does he write for – the people, but which people?

All is not well with Shostakovich. He is countlessly suicidal but he is too fearful to act upon his feeling lest the government rewrite his history: ‘He needed, if only in his own hopeless, hysterical way, to have some charge of his life, of his story’ but in any case ‘he hoped to be dead by the time 1976 came around.’

Could he get any more pessimistic? Well, yes: ‘Life was the cat that dragged the parrot downstairs by its tail; his head banged against every step.’

This biography highlights the art of power and the power of art. But it is intensely focused on Shostakovich’s gloom-and-doom approach to life, his powerlessness in a world of power, the juxtaposition of courage with cowardice, and optimism with pessimism. It is the tragedy, not of fearlessness in art and its consequences, but of the fear to express his creativity without fear.

The Noise of Time is well-written, echoing the anxiety and nervousness of a creative artist etched into every word. I enjoyed it.







MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).
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