Analysis Of Metroland By Julian Patrick Barnes

Julian Patrick Barnes is an award winning British from London best known for his post-modernist literature and crime fiction novels. His most prestigious awards include a Man Booker Prize Award in 2011 and three shortlists for the same in 2005, 1998, and 1984. He is also the winner of the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award and the Commandeur of L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He typically writes his crime fiction under the moniker of Dan Kavagh. He has also written numerous essays, short stories and novels under his real name. He translated one of Alphonse Daudet’s novels and a German cartoon collection by Volker Kriegel into English. For the most part, hos novels deal with the themes of love, truth, reality, and history.
It tells the story of Christopher Lloyd a young man growing up in London which is aptly named the Metro-land. It also tells of his sojourn into Paris where he was a student undertaking his masters studies and the years after he comes back to London to get married. Christopher and his best frined Toni had always despised the bourgeois class of England. But when Chris comes back to England he becomes one of the elite class much to the chagrin of his friend. He gets a cushy secure job with a publishing firm, buys a house marries and has a child. While Christopher acknowledges that his life is banal and now what he would have wanted it to be he is content and loves his wife, even if she is not Annick the bold girlfriend he had in Paris. The novel was adapted into a movie by the same name in 1997 that had Emily Watson and Christian Bale as the lead with Phillip Saville in the director’s
The novel is a dark comedy that laughs at the reawakening of jealousy of a once sensible college professor who is suddenly very much interested in the past life of his wife. Graham Hedrick had been in a fifteen year marriage with a spiteful and nagging woman and finally filed for divorce after he could no longer take the abuse. He is now married to the woman of dreams, the former actress and very beautiful Ann. It is all flowers and roses in the early days as he congratulates himself on landing such a great wife. However, over time he comes to learn of some imperfections which fuels his obsession to learn even more about her past. He is seemingly unable to take the fact that Ann has a life before they became husband and wife and is now deeply hurt by her previous romantic relationships. He now lives a life full of wild imaginations where he is humiliated and starts concocting revenge plans on Ann’s exes. His weird behavior is beginning to get to his friend Jack and his wife and it is not long before he thinks his friend might be two-timing