Mind Picker: The Noise of Time

Art belongs to everybody and nobody. Art belongs to all time and no time. Art belongs to those who create it and those who savour it. Art no more belongs to the People and the Party than it once belonged to the aristocracy and the patron. Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time. Art does not exist for art’s sake: it exists for people’s sake.

The Noise of Time is a fictionalised biography of acclaimed Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich. Although in the Author's Note Julian Barnes cites the several dense biographies that informed his research, what he has written is a very slim volume – not quite cracking 200 pages in my edition despite much white space – and notwithstanding its brevity and potentially interesting subject matter, I found the whole thing to be a little dull.

This book contains a swirl of memories – initially, Shostakovich is musing about peat and carnation flower oil and sweat dripping from a widow's peak; all images that are central to some long ago happenings that he will recall in time – yet it primarily focuses on three main events (“Conversations with Power”) from the composer's professional life. So far as they go, these three events arequite interesting. In 1936, we see Shostakovich standing outside the lift to his apartment, suitcase at his side, as he awaits the inevitable: a visit from the secret police, expected to haul him away for a middle-of-the-night interrogation and a bullet to the head. The reason? After his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk had met worldwide acclaim and was lauded in domestic newspapers, Stalin and his entourage decided to see it and walked out in disgust. The next day, the opera was denounced in Pravda (in an editorial that contained so many spelling errors that it could have only been written by Stalin himself; as the only uncorrectable person):

Even the stone deaf couldn't fail to hear what “Muddle Instead of Music” was saying, and guess its likely consequences. There were three phrases which aimed not just at his theoretical misguidedness but at his very person. “The composer apparently never considered the problem of what the Soviet audience looks for and expects in music.” That was enough to take away his membership of the Union of Composers. “The danger of this trend to Soviet music is clear.” That was enough to take away his ability to compose and perform. And finally: “It is a game of clever ingenuity that may end very badly.” That was enough to take away his life.

Although he dodges the bullet, Shostakovich's opera was banned in the USSR, and even though he had always thought that the opera format was where his true calling led, the composer never dared to finish another in his entire career. This is where we first get to see the central challenge of Shostakovich's life under a dictatorship: should an artist keep himself and his family safe by playing by the rules, or should he write what's in his heart and damn the consequences? At this point he dismisses the notion of composing secret works (music is not like Chinese eggs: it does not improve by being kept underground for years and years) and chooses a gentle form of subversion: writing ironic passages into his music, hoping that they will be caught by the world at large.

For his second “Conversation with Power”, Shostakovich receives a phone call from Stalin in 1948. In an offer he can't refuse, Shostakovich is asked to lead a delegation to the United States to attend a scripted Peace Congress. While there, the composer reads his speeches in a monotone (hoping that those present will conclude that they aren't his own words) and ends up being snubbed by his hero Stravinsky and publicly humiliated by a journalist named Nabokov (cousin of the author and covert agent of the CIA). His precarious position is misunderstood by both those Russian expats who would judge him from the safety of their Americanised lives and those western artists who travelled to the USSR and declared it to be the People's Paradise that Stalin presented to them.

There were those who understood a little better, who supported you, and yet at the same time were disappointed in you. Who did not grasp the one simple fact about the Soviet Union: that it was impossible to tell the truth here and live. Who imagined they knew how Power operated and wanted you to fight it as they believed they would do in your position. In other words, they wanted your blood.

In his third “Conversation with Power”, Shostakovich is by now an established man – the year is 1960 and Stalin has died and been replaced by the more moderate Nikita “the Corncob” Khrushchev – and he is hounded at public events by Party official Pyotr Pospelov who wants to appoint him Chairman of the Russian Federation Union of Composers. By playing by the official rules for so long, Shostakovich has received many awards and gained a comfortable lifestyle, all while convincing himself that he lived outside the political sphere; his own hands were clean. Yet now, Pospelov refuses to take no for an answer, and in order to accept the appointment, Shostakovich is forced to join the Communist Party: the ultimate compromise both ethically and artistically. Shostakovich concludes that he has lived too long.

The Noise of Time is told in the third person, and this may explain why the dangers that Shostakovich periodically finds himself in never really come across as urgent to the reader; it's just all very theoretical without his emotional reaction, and therefore, I didn't feel a emotional reaction either. In the beginning, when Shostakovich is recalling his parents and his first love, I thought that I was meant to learn how these early influences affected his work, but no, in the end, they're just random memories. We read that Shostakovich married (three times) and had children that he loved, but they're merely signposts along the way: even when his first wife dies, it's recalled as a fact instead of being presented as a major event that the composer has a reaction to. We don't even get to see the composing process. I don't think I've ever read a more emotionless book.

As for the format, I found it a little odd. The book is broken into three sections (for the three “Conversations with Power”), and within each there are no chapters but frequent breaks: some passages lasting for several paragraphs, some just a line or two (and I couldn't figure out the rhyme or reason of this; many of the shortest passages are followed by another short passage that directly continues what came before). And while the writing is straight-forward and without ornament, there are many repeated phrases: like a shrimp swimming in shrimp-cocktail sauce...knows as much about music as pigs know about oranges...his hands were small and “non-pianistic”...even the phrase “the noise of time” is used six or seven times. What I couldn't figure out is if these repetitions were meant to signify an obsessively compulsive mind or if they were the equivalent of musical themes that repeat themselves in classical compositions. (And could the odd passage breaks also have a musical equivalent?) Because this book is so short, Barnes had to pick and choose what events he would include, and every repetition and every break of white space struck me as a waste (which surely is an admission that something important went right over my head).

As with any biographical type book, I'm pleased to have learned something new about a famous person and his place in time, but like I said before, I found The Noise of Time to be fairly dull. It might very well end up winning awards, but to evaluate my own experience, I'd give it a low three stars.