Bamboozled in Batlava - 'Batlava Lake' by Adam Mars-Jones reviewed

I first became aware of Fitzcarraldo Editions when, browsing in a bookshop, I came across Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by the Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk. Apart from the striking title (taken from the poetry of William Blake) the look of the book set it apart from everything else on the bookshelf. With its text-only blue and white cover, French flaps and title page at the back, the design of the book reminded me of those cream and red bindings of Gallimard’s NRF and l’Arpenteur paperbacks. In other words, it looked like it had been produced by a French publisher. The old adage that you can't judge a book by its cover is only partly true in the book trade because all readers do indeed judge books by their covers. So the idea of both Gallimard and Fitzcarraldo Editions seems to be that the writing should speak for itself and the uniformity of cover design should create a brand loyalty where readers can expect consistently high-quality literary fiction (and essays.)

Fitzcarraldo Editions was created in 2014 by The White Review’s founder Jacques Testard – an editor and publisher who learnt his trade in French publishing houses, (something which helps explain the Fitzcarraldo aesthetic.) Their current catalogue includes some forty fiction titles as well as a similar number of extended essays. One of their latest releases is Adam Mars-Jones’ novella Batlava Lake.  

Batlava Lake recounts the experiences of a recently-divorced civil engineer, Barry Ashton, who spent time in Kosovo in 1999 attached to the Royal Engineer Corps of the British Army. Adam Mars-Jones is no fan of chapter breaks, and so the 97 pages of the novella are made up of a continuous first-person monologue. With no dramatic changes of scene, and no variation in point of view, the reader is at the mercy of Barry as he describes events in Kosovo, his relationship with the military engineers, his marriage and his relationship with his children. I’ve known a few engineers in my time and, through the character of Barry, Mars-Jones does a convincing job of capturing the mindset of many an engineer – the tendency to concrete thinking, a lack of emotional intelligence and an intolerance of people who don’t (or can’t) see the world as a series of logical, reducible systems. 

Barry is, frankly, not just an unreliable narrator but an annoying one, with his clipped, shorthand use of language, partly suggestive of a military way of speaking, partly reflecting his belief that, if he can make himself understood in fewer words, why should he bother to form whole sentences. Paradoxically, far from being economical with language, he is digressive in his account of things. Sometimes he’s unintentionally witty. Describing his arrival at a war-torn hotel in Pristina, he recalls: “I was hoping for curtains, but I would have preferred windows without curtains to what I got. Curtains without windows. Curtains don’t do the same job as windows, it’s a fact.”

Occasionally Barry shows some self-awareness and a self-deprecating humour: “Most of what I’d done in Kosovo was modular, all the bases were modular. My brain was modular! Probably.” He recalls one incident prior to Kosovo when he’d been on a residential training course and the Corps of Engineers had conspired to get him drunk on Caffrey’s the night before an important exam. (The fact that it's Caffrey's is significant and I can attest to the specific kind of hangover that particular Irish ale can induce!) The drinking competition - and the later incident where Barry takes part in a boat-building competition - show his vulnerability. Desperate for respect, and to be one of the lads, he is outwitted by the army engineers – “And I should have known better, I did know better. I absolutely knew better. Made no difference.”

Again, with hindsight, he shows some insight into what lay behind the drinking incident: “I’m not used to people cheering me on, haven’t had a lot of that, and I suppose that was part of what got me bamboozled.” Still, his engineer’s brain can’t stop itself from analysing the process: “I had been concentrating on the wrong end of the process, and I was forgetting that the Engineers, guess what, are always likely to be engineering something. If I had been paying proper attention, I'd have noticed that the competition were getting pints that had been sitting for a minute or two, and I was being handed pints that have been under the tap seconds before (…) It's all to do with the delivery system of Caffrey’s. Not just carbon dioxide. Nitrogen. I'd been drinking those pints while they were still chock full of tiny bubbles (…) Potent as hell. Not good!”

Barry shows a matter-of-fact acceptance of the break-up of his family, (just as he seems largely indifferent to the plight of the few Kosovar Albanians he comes across.) But, if he is not a particularly sympathetic character, in the end Barry seems rather pitiful. Bemused, (or perhaps bamboozled), with his marriage breaking down, not much of a relationship with his kids, a civilian figure-of-fun to his military colleagues, he endlessly, chirpily, goes on about how he likes to keep busy, all the time quietly hoping for a little respect.