The Noise of Time begins in 1937, for all intents and purposes, with a 30-year-old man sensing his end.
The man is Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich. Packed suitcase at his feet, we find him grimly waiting in the dead of night outside the door of his flat, smoking cigarette after cigarette, while his wife and child sleep inside. Shostakovich has good reason to believe that the Soviet authorities will arrive at any moment to take him away.
His crime? Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, an opera that displeased Comrade Stalin so much that, in all likelihood, he wrote the scathing Pravda review/veiled death threat himself: "there were enough grammatical errors to suggest the pen of one whose mistakes could never be corrected". (Fun thought exercise: imagine Andrew Lloyd Webber awaiting imprisonment or death after a review of Cats penned by Margaret Thatcher.)
Though branded an “enemy of the people”, the composer survives the Great Purge in which an estimated 10 million Russians lost their lives.
Julian Barnes’s novel ends in 1975 with Shostakovich’s actual end and it is those 38 intervening years that are documented in this sad, self-lacerating and darkly funny hybrid of a novel.
The Noise of Time is both a burrowing meditation on an artist's lifelong relationship with totalitarian power, fear and compromise, and a fascinating fictional biography of one of the 20th century's greatest composers. Like the best biographies, fictional or otherwise, one doesn't have to come to The Noise of Time with a great deal of knowledge or even interest in Shostakovich or his music. Though I'd be surprised if most readers don't find themselves on, say, Spotify, exploring or rediscovering Shostakovich's work: this is part of the delight in reading this novel, and not a small one.
Barnes is a master, and brings you in immediately, intimately into the composer’s thoughts and the terrifying world which shaped them.
Neurotic, cowardly, brilliant and always beleaguered, Barnes’s Shostakovich comes alive not so much in action – the book is long on telling, short on showing – but in the mental anguish and memories of one man and his complicated relationship to a system seemingly intent on breaking him and his art.
The novel is divided into three parts: three times of crisis in Shostakovich’s life. The first finds him waiting for that prison or death sentence which never comes, following Stalin’s review of his opera and its bourgeois “quacks and grunts and growls”.
We are shown a young talent creating challenging music in a time when such music was deemed an enemy to the people. “A composer was expected to increase his output just as a coal miner was, and his music was expected to warm hearts just as a miner’s coal warmed bodies.”
The second, and most darkly entertaining, section of the novel takes place in 1949, much of it in the United States. Shostakovich is now mostly rehabilitated. To survive, he has partly capitulated.
One of the novel’s absurdist highlights has Stalin himself calling Shostakovich to request that he join the Soviet delegation for the Cultural and Scientific Congress for World Peace in New York. Shostakovich says that he simply cannot, that he will get airsick. Stalin says they can give him medication for this. Shostakovich tries again: he cannot afford a proper tail-suit. Stalin says that this, too, can be arranged. Attending the Congress for World Peace and reading statements prepared by the Communist party is a deeply, humiliating experience for Shostakovich, one that comes to feel worse than the death that did not take him in 1937.
The final section of the novel finds Shostakovich at the end of his life, now the most glorified and, apparently, tortured composer in the Soviet Union. Here the state makes its final claim, getting him to join the official Communist Party.
Barnes has an incredible feel for the soul-destroying human tragedy that this entails, leaving us with a haunted man torn asunder by the state and his own life within it. What has his life amounted to? What has his art accomplished within the confines of such a horrific and absurd state? Is cowardice what he will now be forever known for, or can his music survive its creator? Is survival the same thing as cowardice? And, most importantly, who can really judge?
“To some questions, there were no answers. Or at least, the questions stop when you die. Death cures the hunchback, as Khrushchev liked to say.”
Tod Wodicka’s second novel The Household Spirit was published last year. He lives in Berlin.
thereview@thenational.ae
How to protect yourself when air quality drops
Install an air filter in your home.
Close your windows and turn on the AC.
Shower or bath after being outside.
Wear a face mask.
Stay indoors when conditions are particularly poor.
If driving, turn your engine off when stationary.
Crops that could be introduced to the UAE
1: Quinoa
2. Bathua
3. Amaranth
4. Pearl and finger millet
5. Sorghum
COMPANY PROFILE
Name: Almnssa
Started: August 2020
Founder: Areej Selmi
Based: Gaza
Sectors: Internet, e-commerce
Investments: Grants/private funding
BlacKkKlansman
Director: Spike Lee
Starring: John David Washington; Adam Driver
Five stars
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Cryopreservation: A timeline
- Keyhole surgery under general anaesthetic
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Guide to intelligent investing
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The Sand Castle
Director: Matty Brown
Stars: Nadine Labaki, Ziad Bakri, Zain Al Rafeea, Riman Al Rafeea
Rating: 2.5/5
Other workplace saving schemes
- The UAE government announced a retirement savings plan for private and free zone sector employees in 2023.
- Dubai’s savings retirement scheme for foreign employees working in the emirate’s government and public sector came into effect in 2022.
- National Bonds unveiled a Golden Pension Scheme in 2022 to help private-sector foreign employees with their financial planning.
- In April 2021, Hayah Insurance unveiled a workplace savings plan to help UAE employees save for their retirement.
- Lunate, an Abu Dhabi-based investment manager, has launched a fund that will allow UAE private companies to offer employees investment returns on end-of-service benefits.
COMPANY PROFILE
Name: HyperSpace
Started: 2020
Founders: Alexander Heller, Rama Allen and Desi Gonzalez
Based: Dubai, UAE
Sector: Entertainment
Number of staff: 210
Investment raised: $75 million from investors including Galaxy Interactive, Riyadh Season, Sega Ventures and Apis Venture Partners
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COMPANY PROFILE
Founders: Alhaan Ahmed, Alyina Ahmed and Maximo Tettamanzi
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If you go
Where to stay: Courtyard by Marriott Titusville Kennedy Space Centre has unparalleled views of the Indian River. Alligators can be spotted from hotel room balconies, as can several rocket launch sites. The hotel also boasts cool space-themed decor.
When to go: Florida is best experienced during the winter months, from November to May, before the humidity kicks in.
How to get there: Emirates currently flies from Dubai to Orlando five times a week.