Flesh

LoveReading Says

At once direct, understated and emphatic, David Szalay’s Flesh is a brilliantly brutal novel about a young man’s life journey from a terrible incident in his lonely teenage years, through to serving in the army, and drifting through a succession of circumstances that see him rise, in a way, and fall, in a big way, throughout his adult life.

“He doesn’t know what it’s like for other people. He only has his own experience.” So the author sums up his protagonist, István, near the start of a remarkable novel that subsequently shows how István’s life experiences barely inform the twists and turns his life takes. Rather, he remains forever subject to the ebbs and flows of tides beyond his control. 

We first meet István as a fifteen-year-old loner who lives with his mother in an apartment block in Hungary. After drifting apart from his sole friend, his encounters with a much older married woman lead to sexual awakenings, and an accidental violent incident that shapes his next years. Seeing few other opportunities, he signs up to the army, leaves after a five-year stint in Iraq, and drifts back to his mother’s town: “He thinks of the job at the winery as a very temporary thing, something he will do for a few months maybe, just until he finds something else. Except that he isn’t actually trying to find anything else. It’s like he’s waiting for something else to find him. Or not even that. He isn’t really thinking about the future at all.”

And so, this drifting path continues when one job leads to another, when one kind of relationship morphs into another kind of relationship, and István finds himself in the circle of London’s super-wealthy elite, before a great unravelling.

Consummately compelling, Flesh is a cuttingly moving story of transformations, and accidents (happy and otherwise) that lays bare cold-blooded truths about the human condition, and how life is barely within our grasp or control. I couldn’t put it down.

Joanne Owen

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