Metroland

Metroland is the debut novel by Julian Barnes, published in 1980, when Barnes was already in his thirties. It follows our protagonist Christopher Lloyd across three different stages of his life, from cynical teenager to settled suburban father.

The first section of the book was easily my favourite. Christopher and his friend Toni are teenagers growing up in suburban London, and both are desperate to reject anything they see as conventional or middle class. They spend half the book acting intellectually and morally superior to everyone around them while also being deeply immature themselves. A lot of their conversations are pretentious, nihilistic, and completely overdramatic in the way that teenagers can be, but Barnes writes them with a lot of affection and humour. I found it genuinely very funny!

The book then jumps ahead twice: first to Christopher living in Paris on a literary scholarship, and later to him returning to suburban life with a wife and child. By this point, the novel becomes much more interested in whether growing up inevitably means becoming the sort of person you used to look down on.

Christopher reminded me a bit of Holden Caulfield, except he actually grows out of his angsty that phase. Toni doesn’t. He stays trapped in the same cynical teenage mindset, and there’s a real sense that he resents Christopher for developing as a person.

What I liked most about the book is that Barnes never fully takes a side. Christopher’s younger self is obviously naive and self-important, but his adult life also feels slightly disappointing to him. In one scene, while laying next to his sleeping wife Marion, he enumerates his achievements in his mind, but still feels like there is something missing, some expectations from youth that were never realised. There’s this quiet feeling hanging over the final section of the book where Christopher seems to be asking himself; is this really all adulthood is? It’s an interesting exploration of societal expectations and marital fidelity which really marks a departure from the coming of age themes at the beginning of the book. I enjoy that Barnes writes his characters in an understated and, for lack of a better word, British way, so that this conflict isn’t presented in an overblown, dramatic midlife crisis, but more so as a realisation that an ordinary life does in fact become exactly that; ordinary.

I think that’s why the book worked so well for me. It’s not really a story about rebellion, but about what comes after rebellion stops being sustainable. In my eyes, Christopher doesn’t exactly betray his younger self, but he does slowly become ordinary. The novel leaves it up to the reader whether to see that as a triumph or as defeat. I enjoyed it greatly and I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys a good coming of age story, but I think that label is underselling it.