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Ryan Paine

Metro by Alasdair Duncan

by
April 2007, no. 290

Alasdair Duncan’s Second novel, Metro, opens as a perceptive and witty portrait of the urban, metrosexual scene. Once again, the main character is a repressed homosexual: this time his peers are twenty-something business and law students. The novel palls around chapter four, just maintaining interest in loops of nightclub scenes, bawdy behaviour and skin-deep insights. The vernacular tone is refreshing, given today’s stuffy publishing landscape, so it is unfortunate that the cynical and superficial misrepresentations of the contemporary sexual mores undermine the novel’s social commentary.

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Aldous Huxley often prioritised the expression of themes and ideas over the development of character and plot in his fiction. Ape and Essence (1948), one of his less well-known novellas, was no exception, but it was also funny and thought-provoking. The Island of Four Rivers, by Christopher Morgan, has none of these redeeming features.

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