"The Noise of Time" by Julian Barnes

In 1962, the Soviet Russian publication Novy Mir published something rather remarkable – One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by a  then little-known writer named Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008). Stalin had died in 1953; Nikita Khrushchev had given his famous Politburo speech denouncing the “cult of personality” in 1956. But still, no one in Soviet Russia openly acknowledged the existence of Soviet labor and prison camps that dwarfed those of Nazi Germany. Until One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a novel written and based on Solzhenitsyn’s own first-hand experience in the camps. It was a rare moment in Soviet literature, and it didn’t last long.

I was in high school in the late 1960s when I read a paperback edition of Denisovich. I was mesmerized. Then I read Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward and The First Circle. And I followed news of the author, and he was much in the news. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, and was not allowed to accept it (his wife did). August 1914 was published in 1971.

And then came détente, engineered by President Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and Leonid Brezhnev, and celebrating Solzhenitsyn was one way for the media to stick a thumb in Nixon’s eye. (In 1976, Solzhenitsyn fell out of favor with the Western press, and fell hard, after a speech at Harvard where he took the media to the woodshed and told the truth.)

Solzhenitsyn news reached fever pitch in late 1973 and early 1974. The manuscript for the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago had been smuggled out and published in the West. It was not a novel, but what Solzhenitsyn considered his great work – a historical account of the Soviet prison camps, an account that showed they didn’t start with Stalin but with Lenin. The Russians arrested Solzhenitsyn and deported him. His family was allowed to follow not long after, and he lived in Vermont until he returned to Russia after the Soviet regime collapsed.

Solzhenitsyn was one of tens of millions caught up in the murderous Soviet prison camp system. The entire Russian population, however, was caught in a system in which, if one were to survive, reality had to be denied on a daily basis. Poets, writers, artists, and musicians either had to bow the knee to the state or disappear into the Gulag. Or just disappear

In the novel The Noise of Time, British writer Julian Barnes tells the story of one musician and composer who often found himself on the razor’s edge of existence in the Soviet Union. Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) was the outstanding composer of the Soviet era in Russia; he also collaborated, however reluctantly, with the regime.

Barnes uses three events in Shostakovich’s life, in 1936, 1948, and 1960.

In 1936, while still a young man, Shostakovich finds himself increasingly the target of the regime, ostensibly because of an allegedly anti-Soviet opera based on Shakespeare’s Macbeth. The campaign against him has gone so far that he has been described in print as “an enemy of the people.” For a considerable period of time, he spends the night by the elevator of his apartment house, a suitcase by his side, waiting for the secret police to arrest him.

In 1948, Shostakovich is allowed to travel to New York to participate in a Soviet-arranged propaganda event and give a pre-approved (and pre-written) speech. In 1960, the composer is being driven by a state chauffeur, summoned to meet with “The Corncob,” a nickname for Kruschchev.

Julian Barnes

Barnes uses each event to tell the story of Shostakovich’s life under the Soviet regime, his marriages, his work, but most of all his grappling with survival as an artist during a time and with a regime that will not tolerate any deviance from the official line. Even as that line is constantly changing. It is easy to criticize, Shostakovich muses, but then those who do weren’t there. If they had been, they wouldn’t be here now.

In the hands of Barnes, that is what Shostakovich’s life becomes – a struggle between the art, the music, he is creating and survival in the face of a murderous regime that will grind down artistic integrity, originality, creativity, and innovation. It is a difficult time in which to survive physically, but the composer will come to realize that the most dangerous time is not when your life and freedom are constantly threatened but when they are not.

Barnes, born in 1946, is a novelist, essayist, short story writer, and translator. (I reviewed his novel Arthur and George here last year.)  His novel The Sense of an Ending won the Man Booker Prize in 2011.

The Noise of Time is a remarkable novel, relatively short, but packed with realities that stop the reader and constantly make him reflect and consider. It may be easy to shrug off Shostakovich as a Soviet collaborator, despite his artistic achievements, but then, we weren’t there.

Related:

My review of Arthur and George by Julian Barnes.

My review of The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes.

Photograph: Dmitri Shostakovich in the 1930s.

“The Sense of an Ending” by Julian Barnes

When you reach a certain age, you tend to reflect more – upon your life, what influenced the directions you took, those phenomenally important and phenomenally impressionable teenage years, and how what seemed so vital and important doesn’t seem so much that from the perspective of time.

That’s what is happening in The Sense of an Ending by British author Julian Barnes. But like the fine author he is, he doesn’t allow the reader to see that until about halfway through the book. The first part appears to be the story – the very thoughtful and reflective story – of the young Anthony Webster and his friends. They meet at school, form a group, allow a new boy named Aidan into the group, and generally do what teenage boys of the upper middle class do in the early 1960s.

After school, they go to different universities (Aidan to Cambridge, Anthony to Bristol) but they all stay in touch. Anthony meets Veronica at university, they have what eventually becomes an intense relationship, he meets her family, and they eventually go their separate ways.

In the second part of the book, Anthony is in his 60s, remembering and reflecting. And then a death and being remembered in a will changes his life, and forces him to see his youth in a very different – radically different – way. And we are left with those eternal questions: can we really know other people? Can we truly know ourselves? What do we do when our understanding of our lives is turned upside down?

Julian Barnes

Barnes, born in 1946, is a novelist, essayist, short story writer, and translator. His most recent novel, The Noise of Time, was published in 2016. (I reviewed his novel Arthur and George here last year.) The Sense of an Ending won the Man Booker Prize in 2011.

To call The Sense of an Ending a coming-of-age novel is to do it an injustice. It is that, especially if you define “coming of age” as something that happens over a lifetime. But it is far more than that. It has the sense of an elegy, one sparingly and elegantly written. It is a compact, beautiful novel, one that left me gaping in surprise at the end. But it was the right end.

Related:

My review of Arthur and George by Julian Barnes.

Top photograph by Kai Stachowiak via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

“Arthur & George” by Julian Barnes

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, received thousands, if not tens of thousands of pleas for help in solving unsolved crimes, righting wrongs, and setting justice right. The pleas came from all over the world, from people who believed he could help. Often the pleas were written directly to Sherlock Holmes – a testament to the power that a fictional character could hold over the imagination.

Grieving for his recently deceased wife, grieving more for the guilt he carried for having been in love with another woman for the decade leading to his wife’s death (she suffered from consumption or tuberculosis), he opens the mail one morning to find a plea from a man named George Edjali, a barrister, born in England of a Parsee father (native of Bombay) and a Scottish mother. Edjali had been arrested, tried and convicted of mutilating horses and cows in rural Staffordshire, where his father was an Anglican vicar. 

Doyle immediately sees the miscarriage of justice. Perhaps because of the guilt he was carrying, perhaps because of the need to break away from the depression he has experiencing, perhaps because of the outrage he felt at what had happened to Edjali, Doyle does not give the letter to his secretary to send a polite dismissal. He accepts the request. And because he does, British justice will ultimately change.

This is a true story. In 2006, novelist, essayist, translator and art critic Julian Barnes wrote a phenomenally well-researched novel of what happened, entitled Arthur & George. Earlier this year, ITV broadcast a three-part series in Britain based on the book, staring Martin Clunes (“Doc Martin”) as Doyle and Arsher Ali as George. The series recently aired in the U.S. as well.

The book is a wonder. And it’s also a wonder that the TV series could extract the story it did from the novel.

Barnes tells the stories of the two men from childhood forward, because so much of what their entwined story becomes originated in their childhoods. And he tells it in the present tense, which adds an immediacy and a dramatic effect to the narrative. He gets inside the heads of both of his leading characters, something a television program couldn’t succeed as well as doing and so didn’t try. But the program does succeed at telling the story, focusing on the mystery of what actually happened.

Julian Barnes

Edjali, the barrister, has an almost childlike faith in British justice, a faith that survives his arrest and imprisonment experience, but just barely. Doyle, the writer whose involvement would lead rather quickly to a review and investigation by the British Home Office, is less taken with British justice, and fully understands how it could go off the rails, with biased police investigators desperate to find the culprit and an incompetent trial judge. (Because of this case, Britain would create a court of appeals.)

Barnes has written numerous novels, collections of essays and short stories, and art criticism. He received the Man Booker Prize in 2011 for his novel The Sense of an Ending, only one of his many prizes and recognitions

What is clear from Barnes’ account of Doyle and Edjali is that Doyle needed Edjali as much as Edjali needed Doyle. They would not become lifelong friends, although Doyle did invite him to the wedding to his second wife. But their need of each other at the coinciding time of their lives was mutual and, ultimately, beneficial.

The story of Arthur & George is fascinating. How Julian Barnes tells that story is equally fascinating.

Top photograph: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and George Edjali at the time Doyle investigated his case.