Alasdair Duncan’s second novel, Metro, opens as a perceptive, engaging and witty portrait of the urban, metrosexual scene. Again, the main character is a repressed homosexual – this time his peers are twenty-something business and law students. Unfortunately the novel plateaus around chapter four, just maintaining interest in loops of nightclub scenes, bawdy behaviour and skin-deep insights. The vernacular tone is refreshing in today’s stuffy publishing landscape, so it’s a shame that the cynical and superficial misrepresentations of the metrosexual scene undermine the social commentary this novel tries to offer.

The central mistake is Duncan’s attempt to bolster the central theme with repetitive action: to demonstrate that Liam is struggling to accept his homosexuality, Duncan relies on too many conveniently placed flirtatious encounters between Liam and other young guys; also, halfway through the book I’d grown tired of following Liam around the club scene as he demeans women, beats up the guys he fucks and repeats the well-worn metrosexual quip: ‘You’re only gay if you take it.’

Initially it seemed that Duncan was trying to illustrate the difficulty of breaking away from stereotypes, but it soon became clear that he was unable to comprehend how these characters might develop. The challenges they face solicit only the response from the last loop – occasionally verbatim. The final development came a little too late.

So while Metro is a confronting, refreshing and entertaining novel, I worry that readers without some experience of this culture will take it as gospel that all metrosexuals are emotionally retarded sex addicts. In order to portray the cultural niche that is the metrosexual scene fairly, Duncan needed to consider both halves of the ‘metrosexual’ compound: everything else that makes up the life of a young, urban person exploring their identity.

This review was originally published in Australian Book Review. ( )