David Szalay thoroughly deserves the Booker Prize. Flesh is a remarkably compelling novel, giving us a whole life story in pared down, almost clinical prose. The sentences are short and simple in both grammar and vocabulary. Many paragraphs consist of a single sentence. The dialogue is rudimentary, often monosyllabic.
We meet István as a 15-year-old, living with his mother in a dull Hungarian town, just beginning to discover sex. He is seduced by a 42-year-old neighbour, an affair ending in disaster when a tussle with the woman’s ailing husband results in the man’s death. Then there’s a blank, the first of many lacunae in this story. We next meet István after he has been released from a young offenders institution. Ditched by a girl he likes, he decides to join the army. Another blank. Now he’s leaving the army after serving in Iraq, needing therapy for PTSD. Another yawning gap. Now István is in London, working as a bouncer at a strip club when the grateful owner of a private security firm sponsors him to become a more sophisticated personal protection agent. Yet another blank. Now Istvan is living with an enormously rich family in London as their security driver, being hit on by his employer’s much younger wife, Helen… It’s almost like a set of self-sufficient short stories rather than a sustained novel.
