The Noise of Time, by Julian Barnes

A full house met at the Coeur de Lion in Bath, 7^th September 2017.

The group came to this book having surprisingly not read any Julian Barnes as one of our choices, though some did indulge in an off-piste assignment when he came to the Bath Lit Festival a few years ago. We were all to a greater or lesser degree familiar with his work – some more with his earlier books such as Metroland, others with more recent novels.

The response was broadly pretty positive. It’s a book about the Russian composer Shostakovich – a kind of ‘novelistic biography’ as one of us had it. Well-structured, well written and therefore pretty easy to engage with. One or two did find the early sections harder to connect with, and only felt some kind of momentum was achieved later in the book as the narrative gained some kind of life of its own.

With one exception none of us was on more than nodding terms with Shostakovich’s work. Some took the opportunity to investigate and the comment was made that it was interesting that he ranges from pomp and bombast (his 5^th Symphony) to much more avant gard stylings in his maligned ‘Lady Macbeth’ opera, and that the latter, while initially wildly popular, became reviled under the influence of the Party (‘Power’), before being restored to grace in his later years.

We found interesting insights into the life of a self-confessedly flawed character: Eager to enjoy the pleasures of the flesh with his early liaisons we see a man increasingly beset by self doubt, torn between achieving the best expression for his artistic output and, basically, toeing the line. His questioning of the nature of courage, of whether man is a coward if he does what he needs to do to save his life, of the concept of engineering of the soul – these uncertainties were pitched against an apparent sureness that he was best off in Russia, that his former friend and ally Stravinsky has more or less’ sold out’ by setting in America and was to be afforded no sympathy, nor extended the hand of friendship later in life. Bridges were burned.

A comparison was drawn with Dostoyevsky. Lest we should give the impression that we all spend our days with our noses in one gigantic Russian novel or other, it should be pointed out that no-one else in the group was in a position to support or indeed contradict this, but it’s recorded for what it is worth – was Barnes deliberately drawing a comparison with Crime and Punishment, which similarly features a protagonist who, over the course of the book, becomes increasingly introspective?

Several of us were most engaged by the overview of life in Soviet Russia that the book afforded. It’s a compelling ‘biography’ – much more worthwhile than the usual rather tedious shopping lists of all kinds of information that no-one really need to know. Here, Barnes weaves the facts into a narrative that, without ever lapsing into ‘Then he did this, then he did that’, succeeds in painting a vivid and fascinating picture of someone that we really didn’t know too much about.

The book wasn’t without its flaws for some but no-one really took against it.

We gave it an average score of 7.5 out of 10. The conversation progressed across and round Soviet Russia, travel in general and heaven knows what else.