M is for Metroland

is for Metroland.

For this year's A to Z I'm featuring books I've read based on the Reading Challenge.

Today's book is a book with a love triangle: Metroland by Julian Barnes

I included Barnes in the 2012 A to Z Challenge, especially as he's a Francophile the way I'm an Anglophile, so I feel a certain kinship (as much as you can with an author you haven't met!).

This was maybe the third or fourth book of his that I read (the first was The History of the World in 101/2 Chapters and I was hooked after the first chapter). Metroland is one of those dark suburban tales of accepting life. Inevitably, perhaps, there was a sequel, Love, Etc., which features the characters railing against what they thought they'd accepted. Does that make any sense?

Here's the Amazon description:

"Christopher and Toni found in each other the perfect companion for that universal adolescent pastime: smirking at the world as you find it. In between training as flaneurs and the grind of school they cast a cynical eye over their various dislikes: parents with their lives of spotless emptiness, Third Division (North) football teams, God, commuters and girls, and the inhabitants of Metroland, the strip of suburban dormitory Christopher calls home.

Longing for real life to begin, we follow Christopher to Paris in time for les evenements of 1968, only to miss it all in a haze of sex, French theatre and first love, leading him, to Toni's disappointment, back to Metroland."

For a long time, the movie version of this book was the only reason I knew who Christian Bale was!

Which books shaped your view of the world?