Within his limitations—and it is his limitations Adam Mars-Jones really wants to explore—Barry is a clever, funny and anecdotal narrator, and on one level this book is a cracking read. It is also written with a sharp social observation that could easily have made it an exercise in applied snobbery, but Barry is not just the butt of Mars-Jones’s condescension. The overall stance is more like compassion, which makes Batlava Lake a more complex and ultimately rather beautiful book.
... one of those books that proceeds by what it doesn’t tell us. On the one hand, it doesn’t tell us much at all, being fewer than 100 pages long. On the other, narrator Barry Ashton likes to talk a lot, but seems to have trouble getting to the point ... a man with no friends and little sense of wonder, who’s better with things than with people, and who can’t see through the detail to what’s really going on. After a time, those blithe exclamation marks start to hurt like a hammer to the heart. And when we finally find out what he’s been skirting around, it all fits together precisely, and we look back in wonder at how we got from there to here without being able to see the join. Mars-Jones, it turns out, is an expert engineer himself. And much better at people than poor old Barry.
The cliché-ridden, exclamation mark-littered style of Barry’s monologue is impressive in its consistency, even if it’s occasionally wearying ... Batlava Lake is heavily laden with quotidian and period detail, almost in spite of the wider scope offered by its international setting ... while we are clearly meant to find Barry’s bottomless narcissism funny...the jokes don’t always land as smoothly as in his previous fiction. Nevertheless, as a dark satire of 1990s liberal interventionism and the blithe ignorance that in reality underlay many peacekeeping missions, Batlava Lake is a suitably coruscating and intricately constructed piece of work.
Barry is very much a definitive character study of a distinctly British, middle-class masculinity ... [a] tonal shift in the climax does not feel sudden; what makes it particularly impressive is that it brings to the fore the novel’s underlying sense of unease and foreboding, which Mars-Jones builds artfully throughout its brief length. Mars-Jones’s considerable strength as a storyteller lies in his ability to inhabit the inner lives of his characters so intimately ... The reader might almost mistake his novels for memoirs—in Batlava Lake, the fictional nature of his writing is underlined by subtle turns and curious narrative omissions, casting a shadow on Barry’s reliability as a narrator. Yet, I could not help but feel some disappointment: why must a novel about the Kosovo War centre so overwhelmingly on a white male narrator and his gaze? The real victims of the conflict, i.e. Albanian Muslims, are not given any of the dignity of empathetic humanisation that the author takes pains to sketch for Barry ... Mars-Jones manages to do an exceptional job of conveying the horrors of war for such a short novel, using its brevity to the story’s advantage while drawing an inconspicuous but hard-hitting portrait of political ... Barry never won my sympathy. I started off by being irritated by him and eventually just found him boring ... Since Batlava Lake is structured more as a character study than a plot-driven war novel, its bone-chilling climax cannot, unfortunately, make up for its rather dull and odious protagonist.
... a wry and offbeat story ... An air of boredom suffuses the narrative ... The chaotic structure can get confusing, but there’s no shortage of entertainment value. Mars-Jones’s intensely comical depiction of a thoroughly British state of mind makes this a hoot.
