The noise of time

After reading two Agatha Christie novels while finishing up Camp NaNo (I'd never read anything by her before, and they were on sale, and I am not so snobbish about books that I am above reading 1930s crime novels - which were highly entertaining, by the way) I started in my newest Julian Barnes novel, The Noise of Time, which I picked up because The Only Story still hasn't come out in paperback. The Noise of Time is from 2016, but I'd never heard of it, and it felt like a good substitute while waiting for the novel I actually wanted to read. Which must be one of the worst reasons for reading a book, but there you are.
According to the blurb, it is about a man in 1930s Leningrad, waiting to be taken away to The Big House. Funnily enough, it took me quite some time to realise that this man was not all that happy in his life, that he was living under Stalinist oppression, that being taken to The Big House was not in itself a good thing. The novel goes on about this man, a composer, and how his life during the Soviet regime has played out. He is not a friend of Power, in fact he has three daunting Conversations with Power, which form the main subjects of the three parts of the novel, but in the end, when he is tired, he seems to give in to the Party's wishes after all. Or does he? The oppression, the manipulation, the false accusations and sudden disappearances of his fellow musicians are felt throughout the novel, but the protagonist considers himself a coward, someone who will survive because he doesn't stick his neck out.
It was only until I read the afterword by Barnes that I realised this man has really existed. Dmitri Shostakovitch, one of the most important composers of the twentieth century. This was not fiction, but a fictionalised biography. I've mentioned this before, but really, why do stories seem so much more important, seem to carry so much more weight, when you discover that they really happened?
But even if it hadn't really happened, this book still carries weight. The atmosphere, the way he paints an entire decade with just a couple of words, the short paragraphs of just three sentences invoking a whole life. And there are some great sentences in this novel. "Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time" will stay with me for a while.
In the Soviet Union, art belonged to the people, as Lenin had decreed, but in reality, art belongs to no one but itself. The only way the protagonist made it through those dark times was to cling to his art, to cling to what he believes to be real and beautiful, even when Stalin decides his work is awful and should be banned. Whether everything in this novel is 'true' I will leave for others to decide; this story of suppression and creativity serves as a remembrance of darker times that once were.