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.

Review of Julian Barnes' "The Sense of an Ending"

[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 recently finished Barnes’ “A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters,” and gave it a pretty glowing review. Its combination of clever playfulness and meditations on important questions was one I tend to find less frequently in contemporary fiction, and was therefore a welcome one. Just as in “A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters,” the themes of memory and our relationship with it loom large, but here they are transmuted into a poignant story of personal revelation, not the latter’s illustration of the vast canvas of humanity. “The Sense of an Ending” retains Barnes’ humorous voice despite its subject, which could have easily let it devolve into a cheap, sentimental pity party.

The novel is told in two parts. The first introduces us to the narrator, Tony Webster, and his small circle of smart-alecky, pretentious friends in their last years before going off to university. They all think pretty highly of themselves (I guess that’s not too atypical of boys this age), but one among them – Adrian – really and truly does stand out. The other friends were too alike and immature to really stick out in my imagination. But Adrian’s interest in ideas, philosophy, and history even has his history teacher offering him his job one day if it wants it, and he wasn’t kidding. Adrian has such heightened moral scruples that he even writes a letter to Tony asking if it’s okay that he dates one of his ex-girlfriends, Veronica. Veronica, despite being a total passive-aggressive bitch who led Tony along on a string, was one of the few oases in an adolescence otherwise wholly unvisited by reciprocated love interests. Tony replies with a very sardonic, sarcastic, cutting letter in reply saying in effect, “Sure, but don’t mind my damaged goods.” 

After graduating from school, Adrian is accepted, to no one’s surprise, to Cambridge University. However, Adrian’s precocity turns out to be very much a mixed blessing; during their college years they lose touch, and Tony learns that Adrian has, apparently because of his unshakeable philosophical convictions, committed suicide. 

One day, Tony receives a letter from a solicitor informing him that Veronica’s mother has passed away, and that she wants to leave him Adrian’s diary. This re-opens a slew of old memories and associations that Tony may very well have wanted to leave untouched. After repeated attempts, he finally makes contact again with Veronica, who is still as conniving and cold as ever, even though we understand as the story wears on that she might have some small reason to be this way. In most reviews, I wouldn’t hesitate divulging even the most important parts of the book, but the unwinding of Tony’s memories come so quickly and are so important to the unfolding of the book that I would feel something would be lost to people who wanted to read it.

Thankfully, it won’t be divulging too much to say that this novel is about our complicated relationship with the past, how we come to understand and build that past, and how we must reconcile ourselves with it. A few people have noted that Tony seems to be self-pitying and his mistaken analyses of his friends. Of course, that’s Barnes’ point: wisdom and self-knowledge mean nothing, and might not even be possible, until we are blessed with the distinction between the promethean and the epimethean, before foresight and hindsight. The entire novel is about Tony slowly and painfully finding this out for himself.

Review of Julian Barnes' "A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters"

[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.]

For whatever reason, I like my fiction to cohere in predictable ways; oftentimes when that doesn’t happen, I leave a reading experience feeling less than satisfied. Chalk it up to being weaned on something other than the so-called “postmodern” novel. In several ways, “A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters” complicates my expectations. It can feel more like a series of short stories than a traditional novel – however, one cannot avoid the interconnectedness they share. 

The chapters do span the scope of what we call human history, from a re-telling of the story of Noah’s Ark from the perspective of a stowaway woodworm to a chapter clearly based on the 1985 PLF hijacking of the MS Achille Lauro. A playful jokiness reminiscent of Nabokov and concomitant preoccupation with the mythic (resembling Borges) informs the way in which the chapters speak to and resonate with one another; in “The Wars of Religion,” a Bishop sits down on this throne during a service in church, and immediately falls down due woodworm infestation. Church officials decide to bring suit for the slow, careful, destruction of the Bishop’s seat. Against whom do they file suit? The woodworms, of course. Even for fiction, this sounds twee and jokey, but it works in a most convincing way.

I think it works so well because these pieces do hang together as something more than a series of stories, and many of them provide fascinating things to think about. “Parenthesis” (which might be the half-chapter of the title) provides an almost essayistic analysis of love which I find didn’t at all detract from the novel’s progress. It’s told through the voice of a man laying next to a woman, desperate to fall asleep but unable to stop meditating on the power and mystery of human love. It quietly informs other chapters without letting Barnes’ authorial voice get in the way.

Another entire chapter is dedicated to a fictionalized account of Gericault’s rendering of perhaps his most-recognized painting, “The Raft of the Medusa.” Incorporating the “real life” (we quickly learn how perfunctory such labels are) accounts on which the painting is based, Barnes adeptly shows how Gericault selected details carefully, leaves others out, and made still others up, in order for the painting to ring true to the viewer. This immediately raises important questions about history and any mode of representation, more generally. How is history possible if we recognize it only as a true account of past events? Is the historian always a writer? Or, to put matters more explicitly, is she always a novelist? 

Another theme that echoes throughout the novel is that of religion and its mystifying effects. Read without care, this can seem a harsh treatment of religion and the religious mindset. Noah is identified by the stowaway woodworm as a vicious drunk, the Catholic officials who try the woodworm for eating the Bishop’s throne come off as a little maniacal, and the last chapter coyly pokes fun at common ideas of Heaven. “Project Ararat” takes up a former astronaut who has had a religious conversion, and now has put his and his wife’s lives on hold to find Noah’s Ark. Despite coming from a conservative, Christian town, the locals have their reservations. The chapter ends with him having raised enough money to go on his mission. He finds the Ark, collects samples, and quickly returns home to have them tested. The tests show that they are no more than a couple hundred years old. This doesn’t matter, though. He is already planning his second mission next year, even more determined to find Noah’s remains. It’s not God that works in mysterious ways. It’s the human mind. That’s Barnes’ point.

Rarely do I find works of fiction so self-referential simultaneously so appealing. Barnes might be telling us about Noah’s Ark and Mount Ararat, but he’s telling us about very human, all too human, forces. Love, the weird preoccupations that perennially concern us, ideas – they’re all here, and not in the heavy-handed way we’re probably only too familiar with. This book is playful, and serious without taking itself too seriously, which gives it a coy sort of charm that’s nearly impossible to dislike.