Book Review: A virtuoso feat

26 January 2016 - 02:12 By Duncan White, © The Daily Telegraph

In the late 1970s a group of ambitious young writers assembled for boozy Friday lunches at Bursa, a Turkish-Cypriot kebab house on the fringes of Bloomsbury, distinguished by its proximity to the offices of The New Statesman. The literary editor of that magazine, Martin Amis was, by all accounts, the star of a show that included James Fenton, Christopher Hitchens, Clive James and Ian McEwan. Amid such a crowd it's hard to imagine Julian Barnes getting a word in.On arriving as Amis's deputy at The New Statesman, Barnes said he was so shy he was "paralysed into silence" by weekly editorial meetings. It took him the best part of a decade to write and publish his first novel, Metroland (1980), largely because he struggled to take seriously the idea of himself as a novelist. The company he kept every Friday cannot have made that easier; McEwan had made his name with The Cement Garden (1978) and The Comfort of Strangers (1981) while Amis wrote the decade-defining Money (1984). There cannot have been many writers of such ambition who have found themselves the third-best novelist in a kebab house.It turns out Barnes was merely pacing himself. Barnes wrote more modestly and his talent aged well. As he was about to enter his sixties, he reached a large audience with the historical fiction of Arthur and George (2005) and followed it up with a small but intricate novel in The Sense of an Ending (2011), which won the Man Booker Prize.He turns 70 this month and with The Noise of Time he has written a novel of deceptive slenderness: a short fictional account of the life of the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich.This is a narrative in which nothing much happens: a man waits for a lift; a man sits on a plane; a man sits in a car. All the action takes place in Shostakovich's head.The story begins with Shostakovich on the landing of his apartment block in the middle of the night waiting for the lift that will bring the secret police. This is 1936 and Stalin's great purge is under way. Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk has met with Stalin's personal disfavour and the composer has been denounced in the press. It can only end one way: in an interrogation cell in which a "confession" awaits a signature, and a bullet in the back of a neck.As Shostakovich waits, he thinks of his childhood, of past lovers and, compulsively, of the train of circumstances that led to his fall. He remembers the disaster of the debut of his First Symphony at an open-air venue in Kharkov, when the music had set the local dogs barking. The louder they played, the more dogs barked. "Now his music has set bigger dogs barking," Barnes writes. "History was repeating itself: the first time as farce, the second time as tragedy."Shostakovich's next crisis - his second "conversation with Power" - occurs 12 years later, in 1948, when he is blackmailed into attending a Soviet-funded peace conference at the Waldorf Hotel in New York. As the star of the Russian delegation, he is a target for the anti-communist intellectuals who have infiltrated the conference, specifically Nicolas Nabokov, an exiled Russian composer who humiliates Shostakovich by asking questions that expose how obediently he is forced to follow the party line.The third crisis occurs after a gap of another 12 years, in 1960, by which time things have loosened up a little under Khrushchev. Shostakovich no longer fears for his life but faces a new attack on his integrity. It has been decided that he must join the Communist Party as an endorsement of the new direction taken by the Soviet Union. He had avoided joining the party while Stalin was alive but now he cannot escape what has been ordained.Inventing the mental processes of a celebrated Russian composer is obviously a risk for an English writer who grew up in Middlesex.But Barnes knows what he's talking about. While he's known for his Francophilia, he also studied Russian at school and university. Soviet Communism was a subject of frequent debate among that Friday lunch club.Towards the end, Shostakovich realises "he had lived long enough to be dismayed by himself". It is a third act full of regret at the decline of his talent, rendered brilliantly by a writer clearly suffering no such malaise. "This was often the way with artists," Barnes writes, "either they succumbed to vanity, thinking themselves greater than they were, or else to disappointment. The self-doubt of the young is nothing compared to the self-doubt of the old." The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes published by Jonathan Cape, R320..

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