A man sits through the night on a landing beside the elevator, suitcase by his side. Behind a closed apartment door his wife and infant daughter. He is waiting for the NKVD because he doesn’t want his family to witness the door being kicked down, the husband and father dragged from bed. Equally he tells himself that a man who leaves with a suitcase is a man with a chance of returning.
In Julian Barnes's new novel, The Noise of Time, the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich has been caught out. The performance of his acclaimed opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk for Stalin is a disaster. A Pravda editorial, possibly written by Stalin himself, brands it "Muddle Instead of Music" and warns "that it may end very badly", a phrase that meant exactly what it said. His work dries up. Friends and colleagues edge away. All that is left is waiting, reflections on absurdity, cheap cigarettes, the hope that your child will not end up in a state orphanage.
It is 1937, year of the Great Terror. Much of Shostakovich’s circle, including his patron Marshal Tukhachevsky, have disappeared into the Big House. Millions of people are adrift in the zero gravity of Stalin’s terror.
Shostakovich is most alive in these first chapters, perched on his suitcase, snatches of memory returning. There are fields of sunflowers. Memories of his father, an old song drifting up from the past. There’s a sense of the man and a world around him, something tangible and vivid, not present in the later chapters where the composer becomes a cipher in a series of meditations on art and power – or the abstraction of art and the reality of power.
Ghost of a man
Shostakovich survives; his NKVD interrogator disappears without explanation. At the same time he himself starts to fade into the text, his character a ghost drifting through a book preoccupied with the moral and intellectual dilemmas of an artist trying to function in the Stalinist vortex.
The composer's fortunes are restored with the outbreak of war. His Seventh Symphony is hailed as a tribute to the heroic defence of Leningrad. Western broadcasters offer enormous sums for the first transmission of his Ninth Symphony. Different times. When a composer is on the cover of Time magazine. When power wants to recruit art to its cause.
The middle section of the book is centred on Shostakovich’s visit to the United Nations after the second World War. American networks bid against each other for the transmission rights to his Ninth Symphony, but Soviet orthodoxy requires that he parrot the views of Stalin. Worse than that, under questioning from Nicholas Nabokov, cousin of the novelist and a CIA stooge, he is manoeuvred into condemning his revered Stravinsky.
Shostakovich reflects that this is the worst humiliation, but, considering everything else, it’s hard to work out why. We get to hear his thoughts, but the man himself is absent. He is twitchy and high functioning. He wears bottle-top glasses. He drinks and smokes too much, but there is no feeling for him, the gathered nuances that make a character more than a group of attributes.
You can’t find the man in his women either. They are given names but not characters. He threatens suicide unless his first wife agrees to marry him; they divorce and remarry, but the passion is remote. His fear for his young wife and child in the terror is genuine, but we need to be told about it.
His friends and helpers are devoured by the Big House but do not seem to be mourned. At a service for a friend who has disappeared he is heard to say that the dead man is lucky: life under Stalin is the greater torment. You wonder if these rarefied murmurings are heartfelt.
There is much to be said about all of this – the art and the politics, totalitarianism and freedom – and a lot of it is said. Barnes is a serious-minded writer. He wants to understand what is going on, and he wants the reader to understand as well. Shostakovich agonises over how far he can compromise, how many essential values he can betray before the art is erased. But the arguments go around in circles. Art resists definition, and the Big House is not to be reasoned with.
Art, Shostakovich concludes, is the whisper of history heard above the noise of time. There is an uneasy reliance on definitions and aphorisms. “The wolf cannot speak of the fear of the sheep.” “Life is not a walk across a field.” Perhaps the psychic abyss of totalitarianism draws in language along with everything else, leaving ambiguous phrases and truisms whirling in the wind.
With the coming of Khrushchev and the easing of the terror, Shostakovich finds himself giving in to the state where before he might have resisted, issuing denunciations, writing music on party themes, hoping the world will detect the irony in his position. He marries a girl two years older than his daughter, becomes crabbed with age, gives out about others – Stravinsky, although brilliant, was no help when the going was rough. Sartre, Picasso and Paul Robeson are contemptible dupes.
Barnes's prose is thoughtful and elegant, but in the end you hope for less talk about art and more art itself. The gifted are not more interesting than the rest of us because of their gift, but neither are they less interesting. Shostakovich flickers into life at moments – the scent of carnation oil on a girl's skin, his father singing The Chrysanthemums in the Garden Have Long Since Faded – but these ephemera cannot bear the weight of so much imposed introspection.
Shostakovich’s contemporary Anna Akhmatova, the poet, was reduced to silence and poverty, dangerous to know, to read. She would write a poem on a scrap of paper and hand it over to a visitor to be read in silence, then burned. “Hands, matches, an ashtray. A ritual beautiful and bitter.” Let that do for art. Not even the whisper of history, just silence and the flame.
Eoin McNamee, author of the Blue trilogy, is writer in residence at Maynooth University
