摘要：An earlier version of Peter Barry’s debut novel won the 2005 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript. Considering the content we could speculate as to why it’s taken six years to find its way into print, for, whatever else it might be, I Hate Martin Amis Et Al is a determined effort to deprecate the world of publishing; perhaps there was a reluctance to take it on? Writers and would-be writers, literary agents, publishers, reviewers – all have satiric potential, and Barry’s attacks on them (on us) are both humorous and scarifying. However, Barry complicates the satire by locating his first person narrator, the aspiring novelist Milan Zorec, in the middle of the Bosnian conflict of the 1990s – specifically, Milan becomes one of Ratko Mladic’s snipers at the Siege of Sarajevo.1 In Milan’s mind, these two seemingly disparate worlds are relentlessly drawn together. Writing and killing, publishing and war, each shaped by ritual humiliation, jealousy and revenge – these are analogues, to Milan at least, and he implies they are to some degree artistically and morally equivalent.
