26 Saturday 16 January 2016 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, 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 was a subject Robert Hanks enjoys ’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 , 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 of what life was Much of this section is taken later David’s own realisation that 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 . 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 (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 ’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, , 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 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. They people in a far away country may meetings. It took him the best things Barnes most admires in and a bullet the back of a neck. Waiting for the lift, Shostakovich gap of another 12 years, in 1960, by with age and duplicity. He clings to his and broadcaster being an example met comrades from around the become easier to swallow. part of a decade to write and Flaubert is his never having As Shostakovich waits, he thinks recalls being summoned to which time things have loosened music, hoping it will drown out the – but as an account of the lies that world, particularly anti-apartheid It is not clear whether publish his first novel, written the same book twice. of his childhood, of past lovers “the Big House” where he is up a little under Khrushchev. noise around him. families tell themselves to survive. activists from South Africa (on this To order this Aaronovitch has really (1980), largely because he The Noise of Time is a narrative and, compulsively, of the train of interrogated by an agent called Shostakovich no longer fears for Towards the end, Shostakovich Aaronovitch divides the issue, as on some others, the CPGB book from the considered these questions. Party struggled to take seriously the in which nothing much happens: circumstances that led to his fall. Zakrevsky. They want to know his life but faces a new attack on realises “he had lived long enough book into three sections. The displayed more rectitude than Telegraph for Animals is at times an awkward idea of himself as a novelist. The a man waits for a lift; a man sits He remembers the disaster of the about his relationship with his his integrity. It has been decided to be dismayed by himself ”. It is a first, and much the longest, is the mainstream political parties). £15.99 plus book, but if it has a moral it is the company he kept every Friday on a plane; a man sits in a car. debut of his First Symphony at an patron Marshal Tukhachevsky, that he must join the Communist third act full of regret at the decline straightforwardly historical, David recalls being sent on holiday, £1.99 p&p, call importance of learning to discard cannot have made that easier; All the action takes place in open-air venue in Kharkov, when who stands accused of plotting to Party as an endorsement of the of his talent, rendered brilliantly by though it slips back and forth in aged 12, to Bulgaria, where he 0844 871 1515 utopias and live with the mess. McEwan had made his name with Shostakovich’s head; in each of the music had set the local dogs assassinate Stalin. Shostakovich new direction taken by the Soviet a writer clearly suffering no such time and between the personal The Cement Garden (1978) and these three sections we find him barking. The louder they played, realises that he is a dead man. But Union. He had avoided joining the malaise. “This was often the way and the world historical. One Starter for The Comfort of Strangers (1981) at a moment of reflection amid a the more dogs barked. “Now his even during the Great Terror you party while Stalin was alive but with artists,” Barnes writes, “either chapter follows the history of the 10: David while Amis wrote the decade- larger crisis, the “skittering” of his music has set bigger dogs barking,” can get lucky; Zakrevsky is himself now, try as he might, he cannot they succumbed to vanity, thinking party from its foundation in 1920 Aaronovitch defining (1984). There mind represented by short bursts Barnes writes. “History was purged, leaving Shostakovich escape what has been ordained. themselves greater than they were, to the Sixties, digressing to the appeared on cannot have been many writers of text that flit between memories repeating itself: the first time as reprieved, for a while at least. or else to disappointment… The author’s memory of his first week University of such ambition who have found and the present. farce, the second time as tragedy.” Shostakovich’s next crisis nventing the mental processes self-doubt of the young is nothing at university in the mid-Seventies, Challenge themselves the third-best novelist Crisis Number One is the Great This inversion of Marx’s formula – his second “conversation with Iof a celebrated Russian compared to the self-doubt of being slapped in the face by an in 1975 in a kebab house. When Salman Terror. The story begins with is typical of the black humour Power” – occurs 12 years later, composer is obviously a risk the old.” attractive woman and called a Rushdie later joined the set Shostakovich on the landing of his Barnes lends to Shostakovich. in 1948, when he is blackmailed for an English writer who grew If Barnes has doubts about “Stalinist” – his first glimmering (which had migrated to grander apartment block in the middle of There is a manic vacillation to into attending a Soviet-funded up in Middlesex. Almost the worst his own talent, they are well of the schisms and hatreds that venues than Bursa), Barnes was the night waiting for the lift that the composer’s thoughts but Peace Conference at the Waldorf kind of historical fiction flourishes concealed in his work. Back in divided the Left. (This anecdote faced with the absurd situation will bring the secret police. This beneath the discordance are Hotel in New York. As the star its research before battering the 2000, he told an interviewer that has, of course, no contemporary of looking around the table and is 1936 and Stalin’s is subtle melodies. Certain repeated of the Russian delegation, he is reader into submission with period To order this it was important to know when resonances.) The following chapter wondering whether he’d even under way. Shostakovich’s opera images resonate with each other a target for the anti-communist detail (the very the worst being the book from the to stop writing, citing EM Forster goes back to 1919, when his father make the podium. Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk has met throughout the novel; a list of intellectuals who have infiltrated kind in which the author hasn’t Telegraph for as an example. Since then he has was born, to explain how a dirt- It turns out Barnes was merely with Stalin’s personal disfavour memories at the novel’s start the conference, specifically Nicolas even bothered to do the research £12.99 plus produced arguably his best work. poor Jewish autodidact from pacing himself. It seems like the and the composer has been – “Cut peat weighing down Nabokov (the novelist’s cousin), in the first place). Barnes, though, £1.99 p&p, call Fortunately, there is as yet no sense ended up marrying the

best work of Amis, McEwan and denounced in the press: a clear his hand. Swedish water birds an exiled Russian composer is far too technically adept to fall 0844 871 1515 of an ending. daughter of upper-middle-class FEATURES/SHUTTERSTOCK ITV/REX