David Szalay: Flesh and Bones

 THIS YEAR’S BOOKER PRIZE winning novel could not have been more different from last year’s winner. Canadian-Hungarian author David Szalay won the most prestigious prize, on November 10, for his novel Flesh (Jonathan Cape) which—as its title suggests—invests in the exertions of the body. If last year’s winner Orbital by Samantha Harvey took us to outer space and made us see Earth as a fragile precious thing, Flesh takes us into the meat of existence and leaves one with an existential dread. But the joy of both books is that they do something new. Orbital soars, Flesh excavates. One details stars and sky, the other probes skin and sensation. Orbital is all description and imagery, Flesh is watching reality television in slow motion. Orbital leaves you warm and fuzzy, Flesh chills and perturbs.

Szalay, who was born in Montreal in 1974 to a Canadian mother and a Hungarian father, is not new to the Booker world. His third novel All That Man Is (2016) about “nine men, each of them at a different stage of life, each of them away from home” was also a finalist of the award. With Flesh (his sixth book), Szalay tells the story of one man, Istvan, and his rags-to-riches-and-back-again life.

The opening chapter—nay the opening sentence—sets the tone of the book. “When he’s fifteen, he and his mother move to a new town and he starts at a new school. It’s not an easy age to do that – the social order of the school is already well established and he has some difficulty making friends.” From the start we know that Istvan is an outsider, always gauging cliques and calculating his entry and survival in them. The first chapter, in clinical detail, recounts his first sexual experience. Not with a girl his age, but with the married 40-something neighbour who he is supposed to help with chores.

Prose often betrays sex, as most authors overburden the act with metaphor. Szalay does quite the opposite, he writes in such sparse prose that it can feel like one is reading an instruction manual. But the precision of detail, the erasure of fluff implants the reader into the scene. One is not reading the scene from a couch, one is on the grubby couch with Istvan and the neighbour. You are face to face with the protagonist. You might like him. You probably wouldn’t. But to read Flesh is to share space with Istvan; to be in his mother’s desolate flat in Hungary; in juvenile detention when he serves time for murder; in Iraq when he is a soldier; in London when he is a chauffeur; when he embarks on an affair with his employer’s wife; when he takes off on private jets and dons designer suits; when the losses start piling up thick, fast and irreversibly.

Flesh can be considered a novel that deals with the fractures of masculinity today. Here is a man who speaks little, whose catchphrase is “Okay”, who seems disconnected from his thoughts, let alone actions. But the novel is about more than that. It engraves the whimsies of fate and the tragedy of circumstance. And perhaps that is why it beat the other contenders for this year’s Booker—Susan Choi’s Flashlight, Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, Katie Kitamura’s Audition, Ben Markovits’s The Rest of Our Lives and Andrew Miller’s The Land in Winter.

The author Roddy Doyle, who chaired this year’s judging panel, called it “singular” and “extraordinary”. It is not a novel I would read a second time. But it is a novel novel.