David Szalay thoroughly deserves the Booker Prize. Flesh is a remarkably compelling novel, giving us a whole life story in pared down, almost clinical prose. The sentences are short and simple in both grammar and vocabulary. Many paragraphs consist of a single sentence. The dialogue is rudimentary, often monosyllabic.
We meet István as a 15-year-old, living with his mother in a dull Hungarian town, just beginning to discover sex. He is seduced by a 42-year-old neighbour, an affair ending in disaster when a tussle with the woman’s ailing husband results in the man’s death. Then there’s a blank, the first of many lacunae in this story. We next meet István after he has been released from a young offenders institution. Ditched by a girl he likes, he decides to join the army. Another blank. Now he’s leaving the army after serving in Iraq, needing therapy for PTSD. Another yawning gap. Now István is in London, working as a bouncer at a strip club when the grateful owner of a private security firm sponsors him to become a more sophisticated personal protection agent. Yet another blank. Now Istvan is living with an enormously rich family in London as their security driver, being hit on by his employer’s much younger wife, Helen… It’s almost like a set of self-sufficient short stories rather than a sustained novel.
Some reviewers, those who like more obviously poetic prose in their fiction, perhaps, or who find István’s inarticulacy – he rarely says more than “okay” – all too representative of brute masculinity, have grumbled about such starkness. But Szalay’s restraint is remarkably effective at requiring you, the reader, to fill in the gaps, both at the immediate level of all that is not said between people and in the overall arc of István’s story, given to us in such fragmentary form. We have access to his thoughts, such as they are, but there is never any authorial voice to steer us. So we are left to imagine much for ourselves, to become involved.
Most radically, although Flesh is very much about the body, the desires and failings of the flesh, we never get any physical description of Istvan at all. Yet it is clear from his story that he must be very attractive to women, strong and physically imposing. A few little hints are dropped. He goes for runs, he used to do weights. At one point, Helen says to him: “I’m just looking at you.” But we are left entirely uninformed about his appearance, his being in the world, even though it is the very subject of the novel, the way that Istvan’s whole life is shaped by it, to the point that he is actually quite passive in letting his body determine his life.
Gradually, it dawned on me that the story of Stanley Kubrick’s 1975 movie Barry Lyndon is the same as David Szalay’s Flesh
It is remarkable that such a spartan, elliptical narrative nonetheless delivers such a complete and memorable life-story. I think I know how Szalay achieved that.
I have long been an admirer of his work. In 2018, I suggested in this paper that his 2016 collection of linked short stories All That Man Is, surprisingly shortlisted for the Booker despite that structure, “looks increasingly like the masterpiece of British fiction from the past few years”. At the time, Szalay said about these stories: “They are points on an arc, rather than being arcs in themselves.” He has always seemed much more naturally a short story writer, possibly because the extreme bleakness of his vision of life, focused as it is on displacement, separation, loneliness, mortality, the way things just happen and then “nothing will ever be the same again”, does not lend itself to sustained whole life stories. And indeed Szalay has talked about how he had to bin a novel he had completed just before finding a way of writing Flesh.
I first encountered Flesh as an audiobook, driving through France this summer, and was gripped. I was also confused. For I had just re-watched Stanley Kubrick’s 1975 perfect movie Barry Lyndon to write an anniversary piece and gradually, it dawned on me that the story was the same. Updated, relocated, re-imagined, but the same. All the major episodes in the story of Barry Lyndon (the film, not Thackeray’s novel on which it is based) - the romantic entanglements, the soldiering, the advancement to great fortune through marriage, the loss of his son, the honourable but fatal choice to spare his stepson in that last duel, the role played by his mother, his ruination – all are brilliantly recreated in Flesh. So Szalay has the whole plot, the entire arc, supplied to him.
There is nothing remotely wrong about it. It’s not plagiarism. Indeed it could be considered a vital tribute to a fantastic film
There is nothing remotely wrong about it. It’s not plagiarism. Indeed it could be considered a vital tribute to a fantastic film (when Flesh is filmed, will they find anyone with Ryan O’Neal’s perfect combination of looks and vacancy to play István?). Yet as far as I can tell from my extensive research, Szalay seems never to have acknowledged what he has done. For Dua Lipa’s book club, he recently recorded a video listing the five books that had influenced Flesh: Ultra Luminous by Katherine Faw, about a callgirl in NYC, Lord Jim by Conrad, Platform by Michel Houellebecq, Hamlet, and Jacob’s Room by Virginia Woolf! Now that he has the Booker under his belt, will he honour this impeccable source?
