The Noise of Time, The Stranger's Child and Black Water Lillies

After having loved Julian Barnes' prizewinning The Sense of an Ending I was so looking forward to his latest book. Again the writing is highly intelligent, but a fictionalised account of the life of Shostakovitch descends into a meditation about life under Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev. I didn't really want to read a study of Soviet communism, but this is what we got. Full of philosophical arguments about irony (the only way to treat the regime), integrity ("is like virginity, once lost never recoverable"), cowardice ("Being a hero is much easier than being a coward.......a career that lasts a lifetime"), morality ("the strong cannot help confronting, the less strong cannot help evading"). The composer's relationship with "Power" is somehow heavy handed (the word with that capital letter is used too often). His dark days when his opera "Lady Macbeth of Mtensk" is criticised by the state as "muddle instead of music" again is too repetitive. So I was bored instead of being stirred. But that may just be me who prefers a proper story.

P.S. Julian Barnes ( a lifetime Leicester City fan) shares a common passion for football with Shostakovich and perhaps we could have done with more than one paragraph on this.

P.P.S. A new movie out this week called "Lady Macbeth" is based on the same novel as used by Shostakovitch in his opera.

I should have known after struggling through Alan Hollinghurst's prizewinning The Line Of Beauty that this book would follow a similar format. Full of his trademark set pieces (dinner parties again) and very little plot. I quite enjoy a family saga, and the first half was perfectly fine. the writing is very good. "On the hall stand hung their (dead) father's billycock hat that was always left there, as if he might return, or having returned feel the need to go out again". And "her scholarly firmness of interest and her cool immunity to all aesthetic sensations".

But it was at halfway when a fast forward brought in two completely new characters (not in the family) in a literary device that I felt was amateurish and lazy. It felt in some ways like a completely different book looking at the family from the outside, as one of them says "your family is a bit complicated to work out". You can say that again. Then another jump forward and another new character towards the end. And then it just fizzled out with a very disappointing conclusion, despite what the author is trying to say.

I enjoyed the first two thirds of this crime novel, until I started to become confused about what was going on. Up until then , I loved the conversational tone of our part time narrator (whoever she is?): "does the co-incidence seem to be disturbing you?". It certainly was disturbing me. Despite reviews to the contrary, I found the translation to be superb, almost as if it been written in English instead of the original French. (All apart from when the Inspector says to his colleague's wife "you're gorgeous". Maybe a literal translation, but we would say "you're a very attractive woman" if pushed).

Then we have the last third where everything starts to collapse. If you had guessed what was going on earlier, you would have loved it. I didn't and hated it. There were just not enough clues for me, and that meant I felt horribly cheated. Were we supposed to guess, or instead love the confusion? I think the author worked out the story first, and then made a construction that kept us (me) in the dark as much as he could.

There is even a final twist that is equally pathetic. Which is all a shame as it could have been an excellent read. Like many others I did like Michel Bussi's After the Crash, but I will never read one of his books ever again.