Flesh: An Experimental Booker Prize Winner That Challenges Conventional Narrative
Given the title, one might not expect the narrative of 'Flesh' to be so pared back. Devoid of reflection or interiority, the novel is bare skin and bones, almost skeletal. In its spareness, it reflects the taciturnity of the central character. It also highlights the author’s deliberate reticence.
While plenty seems to happen to István, he appears to walk through these life-defining events in a rather somnambulistic fashion. He doesn’t seem to care about understanding his own responses to the circumstances that impact him and within whose restrictions he functions. The reader gets to know surprisingly little about the protagonist in a novel that is hefty in terms of length and crowded with incidents, large and small. 'Flesh,' the 2025 Booker Prize winner, is less a novel and more an anti-novel. Such aesthetic experimentation with the novelistic form generally indicates a larger political-ethical purpose, and one must examine if there is indeed an authorial intent underpinning the laconic prose.
One of the British-Hungarian author’s previous novels, 'All That Man Is' (2016), was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize, eliciting a degree of controversial attention to its form. Readers debated whether it was indeed a novel, given that it is divided into nine unconnected chapters, each of which follows a new male character and a different trajectory of experiences. Each story presents a man older by almost a decade to the one in the previous story, thereby allowing Szalay to explore the accumulation of male experience and the process of ageing. In that novel, as in 'Flesh,' masculinity is the authorial preoccupation; there is an obvious similarity in how each of the chapters of 'Flesh' drops the reader medias res into an older István’s life. The reader is set the task of working out the things that must have happened in the narrative blip between the chapters.
By far the best in the novel, the opening chapter eases the reader into an unsettling voyeuristic complicity. It narrates the seduction of an early adolescent István by a 42-year-old neighbour. The boy has been asked by his mother to help the neighbour since her husband has a weak heart. Young István and his single mother have newly moved into the town; save one classmate, he is still friendless at school. The slow seduction and his initiation into sex are presented with understated and deadly impact. The reader becomes an involuntary participant, the observer of a relationship that is patently illicit; only, this word or the idea it conveys is not made available in the way the affair unfolds.
István’s developing obsession with his seductress is brilliantly captured; the scuffle stemming from it and leading to the unintended death of the husband is an accident that has an irreversible impact on his future. Typically, the narration only presents the scuffle, the accident, and the questioning by the police. The reader is left to work out its effect in the narrative of the succeeding chapters.
When the next chapter opens, István is older, unemployed, and at a loose end and seems to have finished time at an institution for young offenders. He is living with his mother. These details emerge almost reluctantly in his conversations with a young bartender his own age. However, there is complete erasure as to what the mother feels about her son’s incarceration or the events that led up to it. Readers by now know that István’s favourite word is “okay”: it dominates the extensive exchange between the two young people in which one gathers more sense by what is not articulated. István’s mother appears to encourage his interactions with the girl, but she rejects his advances. His sporadic illegal work transporting “stuff” across the border with an old acquaintance, an inmate from the juvenile detention centre, also ceases. Still adrift and unable to settle on anything, he joins the army.
The third chapter begins after another hiatus. István is on his way back from Iraq after the stint in the army, waiting in Kuwait for a flight back home to Hungary. We understand that he has seen action and learn later that he was the only soldier to run to a friend’s rescue, but the friend died in his arms. He finds a job: the monotony does not soothe the effects of all that he has suffered so far and seen. Understanding that he is struggling with PTSD, his mother ensures that he consults a therapist.
In multiple interviews, Szalay has spoken of his intent to write a novel located in Hungary and Britain. The fourth chapter jump cuts to London, where we see István working as a bouncer for a nightclub. A chance act of heroism (the novel is full of these random events that have far-reaching and transformative consequences for István) sees him placed as a chauffeur for a wealthy couple in Chelsea. Inevitably, he gets into a relationship with the wife, Helen, yet another older woman. His quick elevation into the privileges of the super-rich is noted rather casually. All too soon, we find him not only as Helen’s husband but also as the father of her second son. István appears to take into his stride the arc of his frenetic social mobility, from downstairs to upstairs, so to speak, in an increasingly unequal metropolitan world. London forms the backdrop to his upward journey from driver to real-estate developer; it also tracks his growth from late youth to middle age.
The sections from the middle to the close of the novel keep the reader glued but less entranced. It is easy to get used to jump cuts and narrative restarts; as a narrative strategy, they stale through familiarity. Crucial information is blanked out: we have no knowledge of István’s father, his years in the juvenile correction centre, the stint in the army, the reason for his move to London, the events surrounding the birth of his son, the growth of his real estate business, his later bankruptcy, and his final move back to Hungary with his mother. It is possible to focus on rationed information only for so long. The pressure of the accumulated erasures begins to tell on the realised depth of characters, and the narrative pace and tension, which become more and more thin. Szalay’s method is to privilege action over interiority, memory, and reflection—a strategy that works brilliantly in shorter narratives, as in Ernest Hemingway’s 'The Old Man and the Sea.' Over the length of a long narrative, this tendency can only result in a loss: a sort of stunted imagining of the fictional world.
Such loss and stunting are sometimes used as a conscious fictional ploy to interrogate entrenched structures of class or caste. In Subimal Misra’s anti-novels, for instance, the reader is drawn into the narrative but deliberately starved of comprehension. The lack of a meaningful sequence to events makes for a different kind of reading, in which the reader intuits the violence and hypocrisy of organised societies. It is hard to see Szalay’s formal choices as emerging from such political considerations. The novel does not appear to question the rather sterile world of the super-wealthy it represents. Nor does it seem to have anything meaningful to say about the politics of war despite its protagonist enlisting in one of them. Szalay allows István’s numbness to pervade the telling of his world. An unintended consequence of this is that readers also come away somewhat indifferent to the fictional world they have inhabited. And this is certainly a pity.
