Metroland

First edition. Crown 8vo. 176pp. Grey cloth boards, lettered in silver to spine; grey endpapers. Typographic jacket design by Craig Dodd (priced £4.95 to front flap). Published in a print run of 3,000 copies.

Superb copy.

Author's debut novel, which took him the best part of a decade to write and kept on revising "almost to the point of penalty" at proof stage. Winner of the 1981 Somerset Maugham Award for a First Novel. A semi-autobiographical account of growing-up in a cosy patch of London suburbia, the lead up to the 1960s sexual revolution, and a final settling into bourgeois contentment.

Barnes has described the western end of the Metropolitan Line, where the novel is set and where he lived as a teen from 1957 to 1964, as a "a bogus place, a concept dreamed up by an expanding railway network in partnership with property developers". In contrast to the stultifying suburbia around them, he has his two adolescent protagonists in the first part adopt "France [as] an idea, as well as a style, a language, a pose, an image of the right sort of life, and a rebuke to Metroland".

In the second, Barnes's stand-in, 21-year-old Christopher decamps to Paris to write his thesis, but misses out on les evenements of 1968 in a fug of sex, French theatre and first love. In the third part, the novel comes full circle as thirty-year old Christopher is back in suburbia, settled into the bourgeois life he despised as a teenager, while his sparring partner, Toni, remains faithful to their teenage ideals of art and truth.

Conceding the novel's autobiographical elements "in spirit" and "topography" though not in their "incidents" which were "attached to a much more adventurous character", Barnes admitted that, contrary to his heroes, he never wanted to be a rebel. "Maybe I was saving it all for the novel." Basis for the 1997 film by the same title directed by Philip Saville, starring Christian Bale, Lee Ross, Elsa Zylberstein and Emily Watson. "Barnes writes like a dream." –Village Voice

[Guignery, Vanessa. The Fiction of Julian Barnes. Readers' Guides. Basingstoke [England]: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006; Moseley, Merritt. Understanding Julian Barnes. Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1997]