Flesh by David Szalay review – brilliantly spare portrait of a man

Samuel Butler’s 1903 novel The Way of All Flesh carried with it an implied subtitle. In the book of Kings, from which Butler drew his title, the dying David tells his son Solomon, “take thou courage and shew thyself a man”. Butler’s inference was clear enough: here is a book about what it means to live, what it means to die, and what might be a worthwhile way to fill the time in between.

Flesh, the sixth book from Booker-shortlisted David Szalay, has more than just a biblical allusion in common with Butler’s masterpiece. Thrillingly, in an age when we arguably have weaker stomachs for such things, it also shares its bold ontological and artistic ambitions. In Flesh, Szalay has written a novel about the Big Question: about the numbing strangeness of being alive; about what, if anything, it means to amble through time in a machine made of meat.

The novel recounts the life of István, whom we meet as a psychologically isolated and taciturn teenager and follow until he is a psychologically isolated and taciturn middle-aged man. The intervening years see István pulled along by the undertows of life; an affair with an older neighbour that ends in tragedy and violence, a stretch serving in the military, the uprooting of his life from Hungary to London, a vertiginous climb up the British class strata and, ultimately, a stoic and melancholy return to the town where he grew up.

Crucially, there is precisely nothing of the agentive, questing hero in István’s journey. Szalay has rendered a man buffeted by forces beyond his control, be they the erotic or material desires of those who surround him, the undulations of the global economy or the interventionist and racialised foreign policy of the European Union. A consistently phlegmatic and passive participant in the events of his life and the events of the wider world, István has something of the existential wayfarer about him – Camus’ Meursault meets Forrest Gump.

Over the course of the novel, the nature and implications of István’s pliability are gradually revealed. He begins with a detached but curious naivety, unsure what pleasures life might bestow on him but willing to silently put one foot in front of the other until he finds out. But over time, this hardens, first into phlegmatic acceptance, and later into an almost eerie resignation. Before long, István 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 not engaged in an act of psychospiritual retreat, but is instead reckoning, in a clear-eyed and reasonable way, with the reality of fate’s cold indifference.

However, the sense of psychological, social and emotional detachment that pervades the novel does have one notable counterweight. From the title on, Szalay ensures the reader never forgets that, for all his otherworldly remove, István exists in a body: while he may not articulate his desires verbally, they nonetheless exist. Whether it be his disfiguring urge for violence, or his disorienting and occasionally ennobling urge for sexual release, it is through these acts, often sudden and shocking, that we get closest to understanding what might lie beneath his silence. It is telling that István seems most energised during the period of his life he spends at war. While his experience is ultimately defined by trauma on the battlefield and the monumental futility of the “war on terror”, we also sense that for István it takes the proximity and imminence of death, the undeniable confrontation with his mortality, to render the world meaningful and vivid. In this sense, Flesh is a novel that frequently reminds us how often motion precedes emotion.

Stylistically, Flesh is all bone. Szalay has always been a master of the flinty, spare sentence but in this novel he has pared things back even more brutally. Over 350 pages or so, the cumulative effect is one of controlled, austere minimalism, a series of thumbnail sketches that suggest precisely the needed amount of detail. Dialogue is handled similarly, staccato exchanges that only rarely erupt into exclamation. When István is asked how it felt to be in the army, to see people die and to shoot a gun, he finally settles on “it was OK”. At times, Szalay’s writing is reminiscent of Henry Green’s great modernist trilogy, Loving, Living, Party Going, where stylistic flatness is deployed with an intensity that is almost comic, such that the very idea of meaningful emotional connection is called into question – rendered absurd.

There will be a temptation to pigeonhole Flesh as a novel about masculinity; its silences and its contortions, its frustrations and its codes. But while that is clearly a central concern, Szalay is also grappling with broader, knottier, more metaphysical issues. Because, at its heart, Flesh is about more than just the things that go unsaid: it is also about what is fundamentally unsayable, the ineffable things that sit at the centre of every life, hovering beyond the reach of language.

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.