Booker winner is dark, singular European novel for our times

This year’s Booker Prize, awarded for the first time to a Hungarian-British writer, went to David Szalay for Flesh, a novel described by the judges as innovative and unusually disciplined. Roddy Doyle, chair of the jury, said he has never encountered a novel that uses silence and white space so effectively.

“The writing is spare, and that is its great strength. Every word matters; the spaces between the words matter. The book is about living, and the strangeness of living and, as we read, as we turn the pages, we’re glad we’re alive and reading — experiencing — this extraordinary, singular novel.”

In this contemporary, extremely European story, Szalay follows a single character, István, from adolescence into late middle age. Instead of a continuous narrative, the novel jumps forward in decades. Each chapter is a brief snapshot of a few weeks or months in István’s life. Szalay said he wrote in self-contained units and thought of the book as a collection of stories disguised as a novel. The missing years are intentional, demanding that the reader imagine the often rash choices István makes, the consequences of his decisions, and the unknown experiences that affect his life.

Szalay said Flesh began as a working title, but nothing else seemed to match the material. The rawness of the word certainly captures its themes of physical experience, desire, violence and the reality of living in a body.

The story begins with István — a shy, awkward adolescent — moving into a rundown Hungarian housing estate with his mother.

“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. After a while he does make one friend, another solitary individual. They sometimes hang out together after school in the new Western-style shopping mall that has just opened in the town.

“‘Have you ever done it?’ his friend asks him.

“‘No,’ István says.

“‘Me neither,’ his friend says, making the admission seem easy somehow. He has a simple and natural way of talking about sex. He tells István which girls at school he fantasises about, and what he fantasises about doing to them. He says that he often masturbates four or five times a day, which makes István feel inadequate since he usually only does it once or twice. When he admits that, his friend says, ‘You must have a weak sex drive.’

“It may be true, for all he knows.

“He doesn’t know what it’s like for other people.

“He only has his own experience.”

Rejected by a girl his own age, he soon becomes involved with a married neighbour in her early 40s when he helps her with her shopping. There’s no doubt that she’s a predator, but István’s too naïve to be aware of this. Instead, he finds himself feeling disgust, confusion and desire all at once.

“He doesn’t feel anything for her.

“She’s just this old woman, maybe even older than his mother.

“It’s like she hardly exists.

“But when she asks if she can kiss him, he says OK.

“He doesn’t know why he says that. Some part of him seems to want to.”

Szalay said he was interested in how a boy that age might not understand what is happening to him. When István convinces himself he loves the woman, the situation builds towards an inevitable confrontation that changes the rest of his life.

István biggest decisions happen in the gaps between chapters. When next we see him, he has spent time in a young offenders institution, though the novel tells us almost nothing about what happened there. Szalay said he did not think he could add anything meaningful beyond what is already suggested on the page. István later joins the Hungarian army and is sent to Iraq. Again, we are given only the bare facts, as Szalay focuses on the logistics of the soldiers making it home rather than the drama of the usual big set pieces.

The writing is stripped right back, the dialogue blunt. Whole pages pass in short exchanges such as “Yes” or “It was fine”, “Okay”. Szalay said he wanted to capture the way real conversations rely on pauses, gaps, hesitation and repetition, and even István’s flat, grunting way of speaking.

When the story picks up in London, István is working as a doorman in a strip club. He later becomes a private driver for a powerful and extremely wealthy family. Here we have the book’s sharpest commentary on class. István is not openly rejected, but he has stepped into a world that accepts him only up to a point. He’s noticed when he is useful and ignored when he is not, present in the room yet kept at a distance, visible and invisible at the same time.

One of the key relationships in the novel is between István and Helen, a woman who employs him and becomes the main female presence in the story. A long section set in Munich, where she stays while her husband undergoes cancer treatment, is the emotional core of the book. Their days are spent in waiting rooms and hotel corridors where they have hushed, tense conversations. At one point she asks him, “Are you all right?” But his only response is “yes”, followed by silence.

The friction between Helen’s son Thomas and István is unavoidable from the moment they meet. Thomas is sharp, defensive and quick to take offence, but beneath that he is lonely and insecure. He recognises István as an outsider yet also seems threatened by the steady presence he has in his mother’s life. Their exchanges are short and barbed, and even the smallest comment can turn into a power struggle.

Though described by some critics as a novel about masculinity, Flesh resists being pigeonholed. Szalay removed several explicit references in earlier drafts, keeping only one line in which a character calls István “a primitive form” of masculinity.

By the later chapters, you can feel how trauma, migration, brief moments of intimacy, loss and several hard choices have changed István. He is still recognisable as the boy we met at the start, but time has altered him in ways that are difficult to pin down.

“Flesh is a disquisition on the art of being alive, and all the affliction that comes along with it," the jury noted. “The emotional detachment of the main character, István, is sustained by the tremendous movement of the plot. The pace of this novel speaks to one of the greater themes; the detachment of our bodies from our decisions.”