26 Saturday 16 January 2016 The Daily Telegraph The Daily Telegraph Saturday 16 January 2016 27 BOOKS into this trap. He avoids inserting shook hands with Todor Zhivkov, great chunks of exposition into the leader of the Bulgarian Shostakovich’s thinking by telling 90 degrees from Communist Party, watched Inside the the story in free indirect speech, England win the World Cup on giving himself the narratorial television and listened to an older freedom to enter the workings of boy’s accounts of sexual exploits the composer’s mind while also the rest of society with his film-star girlfriend. offering outside context for the He offers much fascinating reader. You expect nothing less detail. Sometimes it is not the mind of from a writer soaked in Flaubert. differences that are striking but He also knows what he is talking the tingles of familiarity: he about. While Barnes is known for mentions the party bookshop, his Francophilia, he also studied Collet’s on Charing Cross Road, Russian at school and university. where I remember browsing in Soviet Communism was a subject Robert Hanks enjoys David Aaronovitch’s gripping my teens and getting a mild a master of frequent debate among that frisson from a sense of subdued Friday lunch club. How could it account of growing up in a communist household alienness, a brush with be otherwise with Hitchens, a something subversive. recovering Trotskyite, and the manufacturing families in the famous Sovietologist Robert PARTY ANIMALS: MY shires (his grandfather’s younger he book’s second section Conquest at the table? At the time, FAMILY AND OTHER brother was the last commanding describes the family’s COMMUNISTS T Amis was interested in Alexander officer of the RAF in India: gradual disillusionment Solzhenitsyn’s revelations about by David Aaronovitch Aaronovitch is amused by letters with the party – Sam’s realisation the Gulag, a fascination that led to he receives from members of the that he was not going to rise any With a short but ambitious novel about his controversial 2002 book about 304PP, JONATHAN CAPE, public telling him that with his further in the hierarchy (seen as Stalin, Koba the Dread. £17.99, EBOOK £9.99 “foreign antecedents” he will never “too ambitious”, a friend let slip), Shostakovich, the Booker winner Barnes, for his part, had first- really understand the English). then Czechoslovakia in 1968, and hand experience of what life was Much of this section is taken later David’s own realisation that Julian Barnes has reinvented himself like in the Soviet Union, having up with describing life inside the party did not live up to the taken a road trip through Eastern ÌÌÌÌÌ the CPGB. Sam Aaronovitch was ideals it had instilled in him. once again, says Duncan White Europe to Leningrad in 1965. He for many years a full-time senior In the final section, though, continued to visit the Warsaw Pact avid Aaronovitch organiser for the party, at one he reveals another side to the Rushdie is behind them; Barnes, by states in the following decades takes as an epigraph point in charge of its cultural story – this political unravelling THE NOISE OF TIME contrast, still has plenty left in the and was in Bulgaria just before to this memoir a policy – Doris Lessing portrayed happened alongside the by Julian Barnes tank. While his peers burned out and then during the collapse of remark of Leah him, not altogether fairly, in The unravelling of his parents’ with self-consciously big books, Todor Zhivkov’s communist rule, D Wesker to her son Golden Notebook – and the cause marriage; the last chapter 192PP, JONATHAN CAPE, Barnes wrote more modestly events he fictionalised in his 1991 Arnold about his seems to have dominated most reconstructs the “family therapy” £14.99, EBOOK £10.99 and his talent aged well. As he novel The Porcupine. Born in 1946, play Chicken Soup with Barley: of his waking moments: going they all underwent, supposedly was about to enter his sixties, he Barnes has previously described “Who’s going to be interested in to meetings, writing articles to cope with the teenage David’s reached a large audience with the himself as a child of the Cold War any of it, silly boy? It’s about us, it’s and books, marching. Though anger. His bitterness at this historical fiction of Arthur and and The Noise of Time reflects it. between us. It won’t mean a thing Lavender was not on the payroll, scapegoating pervades these last ÌÌÌÌÌ George (2005) and followed it up Since Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), to anybody else.” her life, too, revolved around the pages, giving them an awkward, with a small but intricate novel in You can see why he chose party: her friends were other party n the late Seventies a The Sense of an Ending (2011), which this quotation: the subject of wives, and she spent her spare time group of ambitious young won the Man Booker Prize. He has Unlike Rushdie, this book, as of Wesker’s play, is handing out leaflets or making toys They used a party writers assembled for published collections of essays on Amis and McEwan, life in a Communist household for party jumble sales. builder, party boozy Friday lunches at France, cooking and art and has – Aaronovitch’s parents, Sam and The party dominated life: I Bursa, a Turkish-Cypriot written two hybrids of essay and Barnes’s talent Lavender, were devout members you used a party builder, party babysitters, a kebab house on the fringes memoir, Nothing to Be Frightened of the Communist Party of Great babysitters, a party dentist. of Bloomsbury distinguished of (2008) and Levels of Life (2013), has aged well Britain (CPGB) and dedication to The young Aaronovitches were party dentist by its proximity to the offices of both of which proved moving and the party shaped Aaronovitch’s brought up to be contemptuous of The New Statesman. The literary unexpectedly funny. his books have been about the way childhood. It is true, too, that the mainstream media (“purveyors of unresolved tone. This section editor of that magazine, Martin He turns 70 this month and with we tell the stories of human lives, CPGB has never commanded wide lies and propaganda”) and popular is riveting, but also frustrating. Amis, was by all accounts the star The Noise of Time he has written a whether our own or other people’s. popular support – I remember culture; they could not read Placed at the end, it forces the of a show that included James novel of deceptive slenderness: a A Sense of an Ending, for example, reading that in the Thirties, amid The Beano or The Dandy because reader to distrust much of what Fenton, Christopher Hitchens, short fictional account of the life is about what happens when that the Depression and the rise of the publisher, DC Thomson of has gone before. Was Lavender’s Clive James and Ian McEwan. of the Russian composer Dmitri story is suddenly exposed as false Fascism, the party still had fewer Dundee, did not recognise unions. ideological purity a way of Numerous memoirs attest to an Shostakovich. In scale, it appears and has to be drastically revised. members than the Flat Earth Instead they went on demos, placating Sam, or chastising him? intensity of raillery that was by similar to The Sense of an Ending, In The Noise of Time, Shostakovich Society. Still, the apologetic watched art house films, listened Perhaps this story explains why turns intellectually pyrotechnical but is without that book’s taut, is forced to reconcile his own note is unnecessary. This is an to folk and classical music. This life the Aaronovitches remained and frankly puerile. Amid such a thriller-ish structure; less tidy but RICHARD SAKER/REX FEATURES/SHUTTERSTOCK fragmented memories of his life uncommonly gripping book, not was insufferably narrow, or at any in the party after ’56, when the crowd it is hard to imagine Julian more ambitious. Those seduced with the story the state wants to just as political or social history rate insufferably different; party Soviet crushing of the Hungarian Barnes getting a word in. into reading Barnes by his Booker sign that the cogs of murderous flickering above his head. Fields of who humiliates Shostakovich by Child of the tell about him. He is forced to – though the party’s influence on children were born, as Aaronovitch uprising forced so many out: On arriving as Amis’s deputy at Prize might well be disappointed. bureaucracy have been set to sunflowers. The smell of carnation asking questions that expose how Cold War: participate in the degradation of politics and the wider culture has puts it, “at a 90-degree angle to the if you are lying to yourself The New Statesman, Barnes said Longer-standing readers will grind. It can only end one way: in oil… Sweat oozing from a widow’s obediently he is forced to follow Julian Barnes’s his public self, as his family and been out of all proportion to its rest of society”. constantly about the people who he was so shy he was “paralysed recognise his commitment to an interrogation cell in which a peak. Faces, names” – return as an the party line. novels are his music are held hostage, and is size, Aaronovitch’s own impact as But their north London world matter most to you, lies about into silence” by weekly editorial reinventing himself: one of the “confession” awaits a signature, oblique coda. The third crisis occurs after a getting better tormented by his own complicity a contrarian newspaper columnist had a cosmopolitan side.