Exploring the Conscience of Art

The Noise of Time (2016), Julian Barnes, Jonathan Cape

I was waiting for Barnes’ new novel for a while now after the Man Booker winning ‘The Sense of an Ending’. This new novel explores the conscience of the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich through an intimate third person narrator who meets him at three crucial moments of his life- as a man awaiting the repercussions of a dictator in the beginning, an ambassador of the same regime to world in the second and the torn lonely artist making his private tribulations into music praying that death liberates his art from life in the final moment. What interested me was the way we wind up with Shostakovich as he is thinking to himself what it means to be him, an artist, a Russian, a man hounded by power in public and art in private. We see with him how it all began on the wrong note for him with his name a mere echo of his father and how he shuffled through his life into the inevitable tragedy of betrayal that life set up.

We are faced with two impossible choices- to be honest, brave and dead or to be deceptive, fearful and alive. That is the kind of duality with no middle ground when power of that kind as we found in Stalinist Russia pervades life. There is no meaning to freedom and all roads lead to deception. Shostakovich’s encounters with Soviet tutors are some of the best parts of the book. They are sent to be patient with the genius, deliberately working through his stubborn mind ridden with guilt of living with such uncompromising vicissitudes. How the first tutor of the Stalinist world teaches him to begin with obeisance through remembering what it means to be part of history by teaching it to oneself. And how the last tutor encourages him to forget the past when he has barely begun to forgive. Caught between memory and forgetting, courage and cowardice, life and death, Shostakovich drowns the noise of time with music.

The larger questions we are posed with are who does art belong to? And how do you speak truth to power? Art belongs to everybody and nobody at the same time. As Shostakovich reminisces the posterity is free to do what it wants with his art, his music. It is both theirs to judge and not theirs to understand. That is because the truth in art stands all time while the truth in life is dealt with in small measures till it resembles no truth at all. With these interesting questions to explore, I found the novel intimate and interesting.

The Luminaries

 

   

The Luminaries, Eleanor Catton, Granta, 2013

“There is no truth except truth in relation and heavenly relation is composed of wheels in motion, tilting axes, turning dials; it is a clock work orchestration that alters every minute, never repeating, never still.”  

                                              

Eleanor Catton, all of 29 years won the 2013 Man Booker Prize for her second book, The Luminaries. Born in Canada and raised in New Zealand, Catton had literally travelled pole to pole, wondering at the sky turned upside down and all the restless inhabitants of the firmament, who with their limitless influence on the human life beneath, would partner her in grand and breathtaking story telling. The book begins with the arrival of a stranger in the gold fields of New Zealand in the 19^th century. He abruptly enters a stormy world of greed, passion and ambition and soon becomes an impromptu witness and inevitable insider. The intimate world of a digger’s town, rankled by a series of mysteries too incredible even for the schemers and conspirators, is slowly brought to light. It seems as though every man in town has an insignificant piece of the puzzle and a great claim to the outcome of fates. The sea farers, opium traders, masters and slaves are thrown into a devilish world of death, disappearance and treasure. In a land where every fellow is a stranger to the next man and foreign to the soil, the muddied and stained states of affairs conjure up unlikely alliances. 

A young heir to great wealth goes missing on a night an infamous prostitute tries to commit suicide. A hermit in the woods ends up dead with immeasurable wealth stowed away in his cottage. A harmless trunk disappears, a strange woman appears with occult powers to exorcise secrets from planets and stars. A rich tapestry unfolds to reveal a brilliant and exquisite story that gradually impacts the reader with a style that is substantial, grounded and strong. 

Catton remains true to the moods of strange times in a virgin land that is slowly being ravished by all kinds of men. The subtle pull of tension between the white man and the aborigine, master and slave, man and woman- all of whom covet wealth and safe passage to a serene future- is brought out exceptionally well. The capricious ambience of a gold mine that lures and traps men, smothers and nourishes their ambition, leads to unimaginable conflicts in the lives of the characters. In a land where one wills his destiny through the sheer acuity of one’s perception as if one is playing at whist, death and danger lurk like shadows. The only thing that is fixed and unassailable is what the mythical stars weave with their cold hands over slouch hats and flayed corpses- inchoate tales of elusive destinies. A brilliant book from a promising author!