Published earlier this year, and proclaimed the winner of the Booker Prize a few months later, this is by David Szalay.

He has had an interesting career, the kind I envy. He's often described as "Hungarian-British", but that's not the whole story, he says. His father is Hungarian sure enough (and apparently you pronounce his name 'Sol-oy', with the accent on the first syllable), but his mother is from Canada, and that's where he was born (in Quebec). He grew up in England, graduated from Oxford University, lived in Hungary for 15 years, and is now resident in Vienna. Cool...

Flesh is not quite like anything else I've read (and the remainder of this account will feature a huge number of spoilers, so read on at your peril).



Our key character is Istvan (there's an acute accent on the "a" that I can't reproduce here). We first meet him and his single mother when he's about 15, and they're living in an undisclosed town in Hungary. We're barely a few pages in when he gets his first sexual knockback: A friend introduces him to a girl who appears to be available, but she rejects him without explanation. "She said you weren't sexy," his friend relays to him a few days later.

Then the woman in the flat opposite asks his mother if he can help her with shopping. It's agreed he will. And the woman (married and in her forties) turns out to be a predator. At first he's repelled by her: "She's just this old woman. Maybe even older than his mother. It's like she hardly exists." But she initiates him bit by bit into sexual activity. Confused and inexperienced, he eventually tells her that he loves her. Don't say that, she says... Then there's a terrible incident when he tries to visit her, but her husband won't let him in. There's a scuffle. The man falls downstairs. Dies.

Istvan is confused about whether he actually intended that to happen:

"He starts to wonder if he is remembering it right or not.

"He wanted the man dead.

"He DID want him dead.

"'You wanted him dead, didn't you?' the policeman says to him.

"And he doesn't deny it. He doesn't say anything.

"And when the policeman says that he pushed the man down the stairs with the intention of killing him, he starts to wonder if maybe that actually was what happened.

"He starts to have this feeling that he wanted the man to be dead, and then the man died, and that in some sense that went beyond the purely accidental he had killed him.

"He DID push him down the stairs."

When Chapter 2 opens, Istvan has emerged from juvenile detention, and is struggling to find a job...


Hungary, 2023

***

A couple of things about this opening section:

1. The length and style of the paragraphs I just quoted are typical. Reviewers keep using words like "spare" and "pared-back" to describe Szalay's very minimalist prose. It takes a little getting used to, but it fulfils a useful function.

2. In this instance, that function is partly to communicate anxiety (as if, says Tim Parks, "we were watching an animal being led to slaughter"), but more generally, it serves to underline that Istvan is absolutely out of touch with what he is feeling, and absolutely unable to articulate his thoughts and emotions. Which is fair enough if you're 15. But he never changes. And that is the key factor in the tragedy the book goes on to show us.

3. When he doesn't say anything to the policeman, he starts a trend that will continue throughout the novel. Istvan's classic answers are "okay" (which, Lanre Bakare points out, he says no fewer than 500 times), "alright", "yeah", "no", and "sure". Szalay explains: "It’s one of the main aspects of the characterisation... I very specifically didn’t want a character who unpacked themselves for the reader, either reliably or unreliably."

4. Because we're never privy to what's going on inside Istvan, he becomes a kind of cipher. Over the course of the book, we watch him fall and rise and fall again, but we know little of how he feels about this, or indeed how he feels about anything. Nathan Blum: "Put simply: I don't really understand Istvan. And neither does Istvan."

5. So, that initial incident shows us Istvan's taciturnity, and his inability to figure out quite what's going on inside himself, and hints at an unexamined suggestibility and a kinetic quality to his reactions. Overall, the reader gets a powerful impression of a life that's very much not in Istvan's hands. Booker judge Chris Power puts it like this: "I think Istvan is struggling to gain control of his life... That speaks to a kind of universal feeling, something that’s obviously very keenly felt by many."

6. The transition between Chapters 1 and 2 -- where a period of time elapses, and we meet Istvan in a very different situation -- is repeated in most of the chapters. (This use of ellipsis reminded me of Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty, and this is indeed a book that Szalay admires.)



***

So, Istvan has been released. He's knocked back by another young woman. His search for meaningful employment remains fruitless. He joins the army.

In Chapter 3, we meet him again as he's being de-mobbed after fighting in Iraq. He has been through some bad stuff. A friend was killed -- dies, in fact, before his very eyes.

By now a pattern is emerging in the way Istvan reacts to events: There's sex, and there's violence. Trapped in a dull job, he has no way to express his frustration safely:

"On the Monday afternoon he's lying on his bed, smoking a cigarette. When he's finished it he stubs it out in the ashtray.

"He doesn't know why he does what he does next. Something wells up in him. It feels as purely physical and involuntary as throwing up.

"There's a surprisingly loud sound and the door has a splintery dent in it now."

He has hurt his hand quite badly. At the hospital, they can't understand why he punched a door...

That injury leads to an encounter that even Istvan can't help but reflect on. One of the doctors turns out to be from his school. He was even in the same year-group: "That's what he's done with the last decade or whatever -- turned himself into a doctor. Ten years ago he and the doctor were the same, Istvan thinks. They were the same. And now the doctor's a doctor and he's... whatever he is."

He starts to see a therapist. He tells her what happened to Riki, his friend in Iraq. Putting that into words is quite an achievement, given what we know of him. He thinks about it every day, he says. He is tormented by the feeling that he could have done more to save Riki's life. The therapist explains to him, very logically, how he couldn't have done more. It seems to all be going well (especially considering Istvan is not exactly a natural at the talk-therapy thing). Then she prescribes him Seroxat, and they stop the weekly meetings. He's to come every six months... Aaaaagh, you think...



***

When Chapter 4 opens, there has been another time lapse, and he's a bouncer in London. It's there that an act of courage sends him off on a new trajectory (he rescues someone who is being mugged, and that someone turns out, somewhat ironically, to be the manager of a private security agency). He starts to work for him, and it's through this connection that he meets the super-rich Nymans (Karl and Helen, and their young son, Thomas), and becomes their driver/gofer/security detail.

Helen is much younger than her cancer-survivor husband. She's the one who initiates a sexual relationship with Istvan. Which, predictably, becomes messy when Karl gets sick again, and various members of the family -- including Thomas -- realize there's something going on behind the dying man's back.

The gap that precedes Chapter 6 has included Karl's death, Helen and Istvan's marriage, a mutually suspicious relationship between Istvan and Thomas, and Helen's pregnancy.

Karl's money is tied up in a trust, but Istvan, who is now a property developer, is able to take out loans on it. Thomas will not be in full control until he reaches the age of 25, but when he turns 18, he is informed about the loans, and he's distinctly displeased. Reporting back on her meeting with him, Helen tells her husband: "He said you exemplify a primitive form of masculinity. He said he was surprised that I ever found that attractive." Istvan is very hurt by this.

Relations between Istvan and Thomas (himself a very labile young man) spiral downwards. When his stepson initiates a public altercation, Istvan knocks him to the floor, and ends up spending the night in a police station. As part of a plea-bargain he's instructed to start therapy again. Which doesn't stop him hating Thomas...

Meanwhile, there are problems with Jacob, Helen and Istvan's son. Istvan is frustrated that his wife seems to be ready to deal with the boy's bullying problem by arranging for him to move schools, rather than encouraging him to tough it out: "The idea that his son is afraid of something, that he's suffering in some way, and that there's not much he can do about it, is very hard for him to deal with. It's just very painful to think about."



***

Jacob is now 10, and already having his first encounters with soft porn. Istvan's discovery of this triggers his most profound piece of self-realization. He remembers his own physical development, and muses:

"All that burgeoning physicality is held within yourself as a sort of secret, even as it is also the actual surface that you present to the world, so that you're left absurdly exposed, unsure whether the world knows everything about you or nothing, because you have no way of knowing whether these experiences that you're having are universal or entirely specific to you.

"Perhaps it's at that age, he thinks, that you first have the sense that you and your body are not entirely identical, that you occupy the same space without being quite the same thing, because some part of you seems to lag the transformation of your body, and to be surprised by it in the way that an outside observer might be, so that you no longer feel entirely at one with your body as you always had until then, and it starts to make sense to talk about it as if it was something slightly separate from yourself, even while you seem more powerless than ever to deny it whatever it wants."

Now, I'm not entirely sure this moment of insight is credible, after the total lack of self-awareness that Istvan has shown up to now. Perhaps we are to understand that it's fatherhood that has wrought the change (although he still can't voice these thoughts to Helen). But that flash of self-revelation does help to illuminate the title. Asked to sum up the book in six words, Szalay responds: "Being a body in the world."

I think Heather Cass White sums this up very well: "Istvan, neither stupid nor insensitive, is capable of introspection but proceeds, as the book’s title suggests, by action first, thought later. His body knows things his mind doesn’t. The people around him know things about him that he doesn’t know about himself. Only once his body responds to others, or once he notices others responding to his body, do his thoughts begin to catch up."



***

Istvan is not left to continue on this developmental track, however. Just as UK schools are reopening after another covid closure, Szalay gives us an utterly laconic description of a tragedy involving Helen and Jacob: "There's an accident as they're driving back along Homerswood Lane. A fox darts out, Helen swerves to avoid it, and skids into the path of an oncoming van."

Then there are four lines that sit on their own on a whole white page:

"You don't know what to do when something like that happens

"The shock is so great

"He just sits on a chair

"He ends up sitting there all night"

Another gap. Chapter 9. Jacob, it is confirmed, died in the accident. Helen is still unresponsive in hospital. Istvan has a brief little affair with the wife of the caretaker couple who look after the country pile the Nymans originally acquired. She tells Istvan she loves him. He tells her not to say that... Full circle...

Istvan ends up saving Thomas's life when he's about to die from an overdose. Another noble intervention. But this one brings him no reward. When the young man has recovered, he refuses to see his stepfather.

Which prepares us for the gap that precedes Chapter 10. Now Istvan is back in Hungary. He does security for a store called Media Markt in the town's main shopping mall. He lives with his mother: "Sometimes he misses Helen. It's only now that he fully understands what a significant part she played in his life. A more significant part than anyone else probably... He's not the same person he would have been if he had never known her."

He has a kind of affair with Bori, a married woman whose husband is a truck driver. Through his conversations with her, we learn just how super-rich he had been during the peak of his England days. He lost everything when his stepson turned 25. (He doesn't give Bori the details, but we're told that Thomas started legal action against him as soon as he came into his inheritance.)

Bori ends the affair after about a year. Istvan turns down a promotion at Media Markt. About 10 years after moving back, his mother dies. And the novel closes like this:

"When it's over he sits on a bench. The dry petals of chestnut flowers fall onto the path. They move on the asphalt with a papery sound, and when the wind stops they lie still. He watches them for a while. Then he stands up and walks back to the flat. After that he lives alone."



***

You'd think the reader -- especially, perhaps, the female reader -- would quickly tire of Istvan. That frustrating taciturnity; that overwhelming physicality, with its assertive appetites and inappropriate solutions (sex, violence, and substances -- variously, tobacco, alcohol, sleeping pills, other forms of drugs...).

But you don't tire of him (not on the page, at least -- in real life there might eventually be one "yeah" too many for anyone's tolerance limits). Szalay makes you think of all the people who are stuck in cycles like Istvan's, and you feel for them. As Keiran Goddard explains, Istvan's "detached but curious naivety" eventually solidifies -- "first into phlegmatic acceptance, and later into an almost eerie resignation. Before long, Istvan seems entirely alienated from his own desires, a ghost haunting the edges of a life that he is not even sure is his. In the hands of a less skilful writer, this might seem a predictable trajectory, the incremental retrenchment of a mind and a heart in the face of pain. But instead, Szalay gives us something far more disquieting: the creeping implication that perhaps István is reckoning, in a clear-eyed and reasonable way, with the reality of fate’s cold indifference... In István, Szalay has given us an unusually, confrontationally honest protagonist; one who accepts the vagaries of life as being outside his locus of control, and who says so little because he senses that when all is said and done, words are a woefully inadequate tool for the job."

It's a strange novel. But a very powerful one. We read, after all, to peer through windows onto other lives; to develop compassion for characters we might not naturally sympathize with; to learn to cut our fellow-humans a bit of slack. Szalay offers us these possibilities in spades.