Risky narrative strategy pays off Winning novel is bleak but brilliantly original

Of the six novels on this year’s Booker prize shortlist, Flesh was certainly the most unusual.

- Justine Jordan

The Hungarian-British author David Szalay takes a classic story arc - one man’s journey from childhood to old age - and presents it in a new and challenging way, scooping out the interiority that usually powers the novel form.

We meet Szalay’s protagonist, István, as a bored 15-year-old in a Hungarian backwater. He is seduced by a middle-aged neighbour into a relationship suffused with shame and disgust, before a confused act of violence knocks his life off course. He joins the military and is stationed in Kuwait, then moves to London where the rising tides of global capital carry him, for a while, into the moneyed elite.

All the while, we are cut off from his thoughts, emotions and motivations: we see only how others react to him, desire him, fear him. The most we tend to hear from István himself is a bland, noncommittal “Okay”.