Flesh by David Szalay Review

Istvan is a teenage boy living in a small Hungarian town when he inadvertently gets into a relationship with a married woman in her 40s. A violent incident changes the course of his life and from there he joins the army and is deployed in Iraq, before finding himself in Britain working as a bouncer, and from there life takes him to still further completely unexpected places.

I definitely wouldn’t have picked up Flesh by David Szalay if it hadn’t won the Booker Prize this year because it sounds like one of those vague, wishy-washy novels that’s not really about anything - and that’s because it is, but it’s also not a bad read. A major literary award-winning read though? Nah. The fact that this won just shows you what a weak year this was for literature.

It’s hard to see what the Booker judges saw in this one. There are no great characters, no memorable story, no original ideas, and no virtuoso writing in the novel. The prose is spare - even the title, “Flesh”, feels matter-of-fact and blunt - but very accessible. The story - while never really being especially entertaining - does just enough to keep you turning the pages. The dialogue is often quite banal and pointless - this kind of exchange from p.136 takes up roughly a third of the book:

“I’m sorry about yesterday.”
“That’s okay,” he says.
“I was drunk,” she says.
“Don’t worry about it.”
“I’m sorry,” she says.
“Don’t worry about it,” he says again.
“Thank you for being so understanding,” she says.
“Would you say you’re non-judgemental?” she asks him.
“Non-judgemental?”
“Yes. Would you?”
“I don’t know,” he says.
“I think you are,” she says.
“Okay.”

Maybe the novel is about how life just takes you along and things happen to you, especially so for those like Istvan without agency or ambition. Older women become his thing not through choice but through chance - similarly, his professions are things that just happen to be what’s available to him, not because he wanted to be those things.

Perhaps it’s just meant to be a realistic portrayal of a certain kind of male personality - the emotionally closed-off, uncommunicative kind. Which might be why we never really get to know Istvan - by keeping us at arm’s length, Szalay makes us feel what it’s like for the other characters in his life to know him. Or maybe Istvan’s just stupid and doesn’t think anything!

Flesh is capably written and, as a realist novel, it felt broadly successful in its portrayal of a realistic man’s life. David Szalay is not without ability and the book is a very smooth read. But the novel is also unmemorable, unaffecting and quite ordinary - a very underwhelming book to have achieved a prestigious award. I didn’t dislike Flesh nor did I like it all that much - the predominant feeling it left me with was one of puzzlement as to why it won the Booker at all. If you’re going to check this one out, don’t expect much of anything from it.