What to make of a work that mixes satirical exegesis of the woes of wannabe authors with the violence of the 1990s Balkan conflict? That posits a first-person narrator, sociopath Zorec, as he calmly recounts the satisfaction of shooting a child amid complaints about the arrogance of London publishing? That takes a real historical tragedy and fuses it to a fictional character’s cavilling about his ex-girlfriend? Peter Barry’s accomplished novel, an early version of which won the 2005 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript, sits provocatively somewhere between serious war reportage or Bao Ninh’s The Sorrow of War, and the satire of The Good Soldier Schweik and The British Museum is Falling Down. Appreciating its accomplishments is easy; evaluating them more difficult.

Barry is almost too successful in animating Zorec – embittered, solitary, and coldly focused on his literary goals. In reading a début novel about an aspiring début novelist who fantasises about raping the agency reader who rejected his manuscript, it is a lazy temptation to confuse the repellent protagonist with his author. Yet where its protagonist is pathological, self-aware but homicidal, agonised but utterly lacking in compassion, the book is a horribly comprehending study of disaffection, mercenary war, and the tedium of young men’s self-pity. Imagine Adrian Mole grown up, reading American Psycho, taught to shoot a Steyr SSG rifle, and sent in a bad mood to one of the most appalling of modern wars.

Zorec is a school janitor, son of a Serbian father and a British mother. He skulks around London and bores his girlfriend with his dreams of publishing fame. Again and again he studies his favourite contemporaneous authors – DeLillo, Barnes, Rushdie, Atwood, McEwan – and again and again he sends out manuscripts. He becomes bitterly familiar with rejection, railing against the iniquities of British publishing and caressing his copies of Martin Amis’s work, in which motiveless behaviour is endowed with meaning. His father, a non-reader, applauds Milošević’s ambitions for Greater Serbia (‘To stick it up those bastards who made us suffer so much in the past. Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to shoot a few of those animals, and trample their brains in the mud’) and encourages Zorec to join the mercenaries gathering at Sarajevo, telling him to kill his bitch of a grandmother if he sees her.

Zorec duly goes, and his account swings between grim accounts of his settling into a Serbian forces camp outside the city – complete with a caricature-resplendent array of vile mercenaries – and memories of his publishing failures, each fatally judged with the phrase, ‘I feel I’ve read this before’. Sitting in an abandoned apartment with his sniper’s rifle, our hero sights frightened civilians scurrying through the streets and toys with killing them; then kills them. In spare satisfying moments, he tots it up: for each victim he earns the same amount as Amis does for fifty words. He is not unaware of the literary scope of the situation; indeed that is what he’s there for:

The sniper novelist hasn’t been done before, and that’s what will make me stand out. In a world gone crazy for novelty, peopled by the mentally deficient for whom the first page of a novel has become the equivalent of the ten-second sound bite, I will deliver.

This revolting scheme forms both Zorec’s rationale and the book’s substance, and Barry tells a ‘sniper novel’ very well. The grim cruelty of that terrible siege is convincingly detailed; we sit with Zorec in the freezing apartment, we share his distaste for the bestial mercenaries who rape, torture, and grovel without conscience in the Serbian camp. His relationship to others, whether characters in his fiction, acquaintances in real life, or victims in his gunsights (all increasingly conflated), is his fruitless preoccupation: ‘I find myself less keen to write about my victims now … I look at them through my sights, but they don’t come any closer.’ Power is his game; he knows it, but doesn’t recognise its monstrosity. ‘I was not a character in a novel, at the mercy of an author, at his beck and call, a marionette of his mind … I am the author.’ Ishiguro-like, Barry draws his protagonist towards dementia and hallucination: the parable cleaves closer to reality even as the anti-hero falls, as he must, upon his own hubris.

Is Barry satirising writers or readers by having Zorec boast, ‘It’s not a book I write with my rifle, but an opus’? It is an artful conceit, the author-as-assassin; whether it is in bad taste depends on how much you believe Barry is setting out to goad. Ultimately, the sadness in the book threatens to disable the black humour, and the humour to belittle the tragedy. Yet, even as an unpleasant read, it is impressive.  I Hate Martin Amis Et Al. is either a clever and powerful fable or a misjudged trespass. It is, in any case, a tensely written début novel that stings like the hell it describes.