It’s the season for catching up on award-winning books, so this week I decided to check out David Szalay’s novel Flesh, which is the recipient of this year’s Booker Prize. The Canadian-born, Hungarian-British writer was shortlisted for the Booker nearly a decade ago for his novel All That Man Is, but Flesh is my first experience with Szalay’s writing.
And my, what an experience it is. Flesh follows the life of one Hungarian man, Istvan, from adolescence to old age. It’s told in a sparse, episodic style that Booker judge Roddy Doyle called “singular” and “extraordinary.” It’s certainly unlike anything I’ve read before, and I found it off-putting for several chapters until a dramatic plot twist grabbed my attention and propelled me through the rest of the novel. The style and subject matter will not be for everyone, but I can understand the critical acclaim.
Flesh opens when main character Istvan is 15, and he and his mother move to a new town. “Not an easy age to do that,” Istvan observes, and that turns out to be the case. We begin the novel with a huge void in Istvan’s history — what happened during his early childhood? why did his mother bring him here? — and those blank spaces set a tone for the story to come.
Within just a few pages, Istvan begins doing chores for an older woman neighbor, who grooms him into a sexual relationship. To call the teen passive or uncommunicative would be a gross understatement, but minimal is the mood here, as Istvan’s statements seldom go beyond “yeah,” “no” or “I don’t know.” A Wall Street Journal reviewer said the sparse prose leads to an “almost comically minimalist” dialogue in which “Istvan conducts entire conversations saying little except ‘Okay.’” It came off as downright annoying to this reader, until I realized that Szalay seemed to be establishing the foundation for a character who is detached from his own emotions and desires, and even from his physical body.
The novel follows Istvan to London, to war, and into the upper echelons of British society, but the author omits many important events from the narrative and instead chooses to hint at them after the fact. Istvan’s personality doesn’t change much through the course of the novel, but the overall theme seems to be that he is a passive participant in whatever comes his way. The lack of human connection becomes frustrating and almost painful to read.
Flesh is a dark and disturbing novel, but one that’s hard to put down. In it, we see a man in his most primal type of existence: There’s a whole lot of sex, but not much passion, a complex and expansive plot with precious few words. For that reason, Flesh feels offbeat and original, and it’s the kind of book that settles into your consciousness after you turn the final page.
