If the reviews of his latest novel are anything to go by, Julian Barnes’s study of Dmitri Shostakovich, The Noise of Time, may just be his masterpiece. And if it is not his masterpiece in the singular sense, then the critical consensus seems to be that it ranks high in his long list of achievements. With characteristic modesty he acknowledges he’s happy with the reception so far, though he bristles slightly at the notion it’s a “biographical novel”.

“I think biographical novels are kind of cheesy,” he told Hermione Lee when she asked him about genre at a recent Guardian Live event in London. “All novels are biographical – it means the study of life. Madame Bovary was the study of the life of Emma Bovary. Anna Karenina was a study of the life of Anna Karenina. It’s just that in some novels the people are real and in some novels they aren’t.”

The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes review – how Shostakovich survived Stalin Read more

“The same goes for the term ‘historical novel’,” he said. “They remind me of my great friend, editor and mentor Anthony Howard, who was editor of the New Statesman when I worked on it. He always used to get into a tremendous lather when any journalist called themselves an ‘investigative journalist’. Because he said: ‘That’s what a journalist is. What’s a non-investigative journalist, for God’s sake?’”

Apparent tautologies aside, Barnes said he thinks little of genre when he writes, preferring instead to work on things instinctively; a process which necessarily involves crossing boundaries.

“I’m a trans-genre writer; I have been since my third novel, Flaubert’s Parrot. I don’t think when I’m writing: ‘What category does this fall into? What sort of novel is it?’ It’s just the sort of novel I want to write,” he said.

There’s little argument over the quality of his results, but what can a reader learn from Barnes’s portrait of Shostakovich that they could not from a biography or a more conventional biographical novel?

I think the first person in some circumstances can be more freeing and at other times it’s like an iron mask Julian Barnes

It’s difficult for writers to fill in the gaps between the official version of events and the thoughts and feelings of those who lived through them, Barnes continued. “Truth in Stalin’s Russia was a very evasive thing to begin with, and what you said and what you wrote down could be dangerous.”

“When you read my book I want you to believe that it’s all true. If you’re writing a biography you would have to say at every turn: ‘This might not have happened.’ Whereas I can say: ‘Here’s this man, he’s here – believe it’.”

But if discussion of the vagaries of biography, biographical novel and what might be called “Barnesography” were the cause of some consternation to the writer, it soon became clear that Barnes’s approach allowed him to become intimate with his subject, even after deciding at an early stage to write the novel in third person.

“It’s my twelfth novel and every time you make different mistakes ... sometimes catastrophic ones,” he said. “I started far sooner than I should have done and wrote it in the first person. I wrote about four or five pages and it completely stopped. I knew it was wrong, I knew it wasn’t working. I knew it wasn’t working first because it didn’t kick-start anything, it didn’t provoke anything and I realised I had to go away from it for some time. I think the first person in some circumstances can be more freeing and at other times it’s like an iron mask.”

“What I discovered, which I only half-knew I was discovering – although I’m sure it’s been discovered many times before – is that the third person, while you think of it as an objective narrative, is actually much more flexible and you can make it almost into the equivalent of the first person. You can move the third person right into someone’s mind and then pull back.”

As for Shostakovich the man, Barnes’s sympathy for someone accused of cowardice after denouncing Russian composers who defected to the west was clear, as was his conviction that the musician provided an ideal model for a protagonist according to Flaubert’s dictum prohibiting both “monsters” and “heroes” in modern literature.

“Was he a collaborator? Yes. Which of us would not be if the alternative was being killed?” he asked. “I don’t think I would be heroic in those circumstances.”

“To some he may have seemed a coward; I think he was heroic in that he got the music that he could write written, he protected his family, and of course he was prone to enormous self reproach.”

Lee finished by asking Barnes if he thought he had “done justice” to Shostakovich in writing the novel, a question which provoked the most compelling answer of the night: “Yes. And I think that goes back to the fall of communism,” he said.

“I remember being depressed by the triumphalism in the west, in that the reaction of most of the west was: ‘We won, you were no bloody good anyway.’ And that many things that they were trying to do and failed at were admirable, and that it went wrong and that we’re tempted to sell short the complications of life under a system like that.”