Following up his 2011 Booker Prize winning novel, A Sense Of An Ending, Julian Barnes released his 12th novel, The Noise Of Time, and with the success of his back catalogue it was an early shout for 2016 Booker Prize nominations. Having been shortlisted for the award on three seperate occasions in the past for Flaubert’s Parrot in 1984, England, England in 1998, and Arthur & George in 2005, he’s one of the most featured authors in the prize’s history, but will he be making it his fifth entrant in 2016?
Scheduled for a UK release date of the 28th January 2016 on hardback, audiobook and digital download, it continues more than 25 years in literature for the celebrated author. The 69-year-old British writer has had a fairly prolific career over the years and it’s looking like there’s no sign of hanging up his typewriter any time soon. The new novel adds to Barnes’ recent focus on the shorter form novel and while it isn’t quite as short as A Sense Of An Ending, it is more than half the length of Arthur & George with 192 pages.
The Noise Of Time is centred around the life of composer Shostakovich, picking up on three key brushes with power, which includes him standing next to a lift in his apartment block all night, expecting to be taken to the Big House. When the hand of power reaches out to him he knows that his contacts and celebrity acquaintances mean little and that few people return from the dreaded unofficial Leningrad office of the Federal Security Service of Russia and its Department of Internal Affairs.
The story is grounded in the tough reality of Stalin-era culture and art, where everything produced or created was subject to distinct scrutiny and potential condemnation from the state, linking in with the purges in the Communist Party. The Big House, otherwise known as the Bolshoy Dom, became infamous during the late 1930s as Stalin’s most intense great purge overshadowed the entire country with Nikolai Yezhov, the head of the Soviet secret police, presiding over mass arrests and executions.
It makes for another new direction for Julian Barnes as he turns his attention to the totalitarian state and a period in history that would have been instrumental inspiration for George Orwell’s 1984. His last work, and Booker Prize Winning novel, A Sense Of An Ending, explored memories, aging and regrets told through the eyes of a retiree looking back on his life and youth. Before that, he’d written Arthur & George, which based its fictionalisation on the true story of the Great Wyrley Outrages, where Sherlock Holmes writer, Sir Arthur Conan, attempts to clear the name of a wrongly convicted man. There’s a fairly wide berth between all three, which indicates the impressive versatility and creative reach that Barnes has shown over the years.
The latter also went on to be the basis of the ITV adaptation of Arthur & George, starring Martin Clunes, and we’ll be surprised if more of his work doesn’t go on to be produced for stage and screen, including his latest novel. Read our review of Julian Barnes’ The Noise Of Time to find out more about the work.
