You may not agree but I reckon the three greatest living British novelists are, in ascending order of age, Sebastian Faulks (69), William Boyd (70) and Julian Barnes (76).
I have read a lot of Boyd, quite a bit of Faulks and no Barnes. I may have dipped into Flaubert’s Parrot but found it too difficult.
Yesterday I read The Noise of Time – it’s not long. It is a fiction-biog of Shostakovich. As you know Dmitri Dmitriyevich’s creativity was stifled by Stalin. Actually it’s surprising he didn’t leave the Soviet Union like Stravinsky. But he survived and was eventually honoured in Russia although having made some creative compromises.
The words ‘masterpiece’ and ‘bestseller’ on a book cover are suspicious. I find it difficult to evaluate. Beyond doubt it is a good read and a vivid imagination of Shostakovich’s life and insecurity. It is more than a good read in that it has left me with insights into Shostakovich’s life imagined vividly by Barnes. This paragraph encapsulates the novel.
“Ilf and Petrov had written: ‘It is not enough to love Soviet power. It has to love you’. He himself would never be loved by Soviet power. He came from the wrong stock: the liberal intelligentsia of that suspect city St Leninsburg. Proletarian purity was as important to the Soviets as Aryan purity was to the Nazis. Further, he had the vanity, or foolishness, to notice and remember that what the Party ha said yesterday was often in direct contradiction to what the Party was saying today He wanted to be left alone with music and his family and his friends: the simplest of desires, yet one entirely unfulfillable. They wanted to engineer him along with everyone else. They wanted him to reforge himself, like a slave labourer on the White Sea Canal. They demanded ‘an optimistic Shostakovich’. Even if the world was up to its neck in blood and slurry, you were expected to keep a smile on your face. But it was an artist’s nature to be pessimistic and neurotic. So, they wanted you not to be an artist. But they already had so many artists who were not artists! As Chekhov put it, ‘When they serve coffee, don’t try to find beer in it’. “
Julian Barnes won the Man Booker Prize in 2011 with The Sense of an Ending. Faulks and Boyd have not won but are both CBE FRSL.
Delighted to see William Boyd on this list. Thoroughly enjoying his latest novel. I shall have to give Barnes books a go.
Wholeheartedly agree on your nominated troika – I’m also currently lapping up Boyd’s latest – but would add Kate Atkinson (70).