Julian Barnes (Keeping an Eye Open) is the author of more than 25 books, many of them novels based on historical figures and events. With The Noise of Time, Barnes has created a brief, beautifully structured and moving work that improvises on the tragic life of Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich.
Shostakovich survived by placating authorities "who knew as much about music as a pig knows about oranges." During Stalin's Great Terror, he was denounced in a Pravda editorial titled "Muddle Instead of Music." He was reprieved by his interrogator's execution, but was never able to work freely again--"From now on there would be only two types of composer: those who were alive and frightened, and those who were dead." Truth is hard to come by under totalitarian rule, and Barnes mirrors this in his mingling of fiction with historical facts and versions of facts, viewed through the prism of his sensitive, neurotic and brilliant protagonist's mind.
To contain all this passion and mortal insecurity, Barnes has built his novel almost like a symphony. There are three parts, each involving transportation (an elevator, an airplane, a chauffeured car), each opening with a version of the sentence: "All he knew was that this was the worst time." Barnes introduces recurring phrases and themes, developing and interweaving them with ever-deepening complexity and resonance. The whole is framed by an incident involving three characters who, stepping briefly outside their lives onto a train station platform, accidentally create a triad by clinking vodka glasses, "a sound that rang clear of the noise of time, and would outlive everyone and everything." --Sara Catterall