Review of Julian Barnes' "Metroland"

[The above is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure, as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

I’ve recently read, and posted reviews of two other Julian Barnes’ novels, “The Sense of an Ending” and “A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters,” both of which I thoroughly enjoyed. “Metroland” reflects some of the same themes: obnoxiousness of young schoolboys who have read a few important books but not nearly enough, growing up, love, and memory. This being my third book by Barnes, I’m starting to get a feel for his authorial panache, and I can’t help being charmed by it. You get the sense that he’s always writing with a gentle smirk on his face, not unlike the one he always has on display on the back covers of his books. 

The story follows the narrator Chris and his best friend from school, Toni, as they grow up in the suburbs of London (the “Metroland” of the title). They both hate ordinary people, whom they contemptuously go around calling “bourgeois.” They profess to live for art and ideas, when really it’s just a kind of self-important high-mindedness they’re putting on. Part II sees Chris moving to Paris and growing a bit distant from Toni. While there, he meets and falls in love with a French woman named Annick and befriends three fellow art-lovers, one of them a woman named Marion, on a visit to the Musee Gustave Moreau. One day, he mentions to Annick rather heavy-handedly that he met Marion (with whom he has done nothing other than casually flirt), but Annick gets upset, leaves him, and is never seen again. 

And here’s where Barnes’ wonderful infatuation with irony comes to a head: he falls in love with Marion, has a child with her, takes on a mortgage and respectable job that he actually enjoys, and turns into one of those hideous bourgeois that he hated as a boy. However, he’s an adult now, and he’s come to find out that living a middle-class life can be full of the same happiness, stress, joy, and anxiety that even the life of an artist can. 

For a rough comparison, imagine two Holden Caulfields, except that Chris actually manages to make some moral and intellectual progress and crawl out of his teenage funk during the course of the story. Toni unfortunately doesn’t, and at the end of the novel is bitter that his writing hasn’t proven more successful than it is. Being a successful human being first helps, though – a lesson that Chris learned, by hook or by crook. 

This novel was published in 1980, and it resembles what you would expect Barnes then: the author finding his voice, a voice that still resonates in his later fiction - philosophical but not overbearing, witty but not caustic. For a debut novel, I thought this was very impressive. I didn’t find it as wonderful as some of his later stuff – “A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters” is still my favorite of the three – but it’s definitely worth checking out if you enjoy his other work.