PanThe Washington PostIt’s hardly uncommon for historical fiction to take liberties. And certainly Barnes knows how to tell a tale. But for all its polished surface, this novel is equivocating and cautious. It backs its way into the story, groping toward a fragmented sense of the main character. We’re confronted with short paragraphs that offer epigrammatic patness and a lot of motivic repetition of phrases or images as a mask for a certain amount of narrative uncertainty, be it on the part of the protagonist (Shostakovich) or, it often seems, the author himself...Barnes’s The Noise of Time is merely an adroit rephrasing of an argument we’ve heard before. The result is a pretty enough piece of writing that may well be embraced by those to whom the story is new. But it remains as shallow as — well, a snapshot.
