Booker Prize winner, Flesh, 'baffling in its blankness'

This year’s winner of the Booker Prize, Flesh by David Szalay, will divide your book club. It has already divided early readers.

Now, after claiming one of the biggest literary prizes in the English-speaking world, it will split a new section of readers.

The division was there in the unfolding comments of the livestream of the prize ceremony in London.

“Best book I’ve read in years... Boring as hell... worst book on the long list... well done to the judges.”

The chair of the Booker Prize jury, Roddy Doyle, said the judges “had never read anything quite like it".

For better or worse, nor had many Booker readers.

Szalay said he conceived Flesh out of failure – he had just abandoned a novel he had been wrestling with for four years - and this is a trace of that. More importantly, Szalay was toying with the thought that our existence is physical, first and above all else.

So, this is a physical book. 

There is almost no interior monologue, no musing about events. 

When the protagonist, Istvan, speaks it is in monosyllables. 

He says 'Okay' 340 times. His other utterances are 'Yes', 'No' and 'Maybe'.

The Guardian called it so pared back it is just bone.

Flesh was always at odds with most of the other books on the Brooker shortlist. It eschews all explanations of how Istvan is feeling; we glean it from people talking about him. In contrast, other books like Katie Kitamura’s Audition or Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny were superb at dwelling on the motivations of their characters. Flashlight, too, by Susan Choi is filled with its American Korean characters thinking about their actions.

Istvan, though, is only viewed from outside. F***ing, fighting, drinking, getting ahead, succeeding, and failing. (In fact, the opening chapter is a lot of sex – a fact which I had not realised while attempting to read it, self-consciously, on a packed Auckland bus).

At first it is disorienting, Istvan is the blankest of blank canvases. But as Flesh goes on, you become attuned to the slightest twitch or pause as to what Istvan might be thinking. Even all the Okays, Yeses, and Noes become heavier with meaning.

Szalay said he wanted his dialogue to be “almost bloody-mindedly realistic.... the repetitions and circularities and non-meaningful grunts that constitute a lot of real dialogue between people".

The story begins with violence in childhood. The act changes Istvan’s life. He moves from troubled boyhood to life as a taciturn soldier, bouncer, then lover, husband, and property developer before facing one failure after another; he returns to a quiet life. The story unfolds between Hungary, war in the Middle East and London, then returning to Hungary. Szalay, himself British Canadian and Hungarian, says he had reached a point of not feeling at home in any one place and it is the same for Istvan. He exists in places, not lives.

The question for readers is what conclusions you can draw from this inarticulate man.

Many on the Booker Livestream found it baffling in its blankness. The judges saw it as a moving portrait of a man. Others like the New York Times said it had a bigger theme; life just happens to Istvan, as happens to most of us. He is acted upon, not acts, so a book for our times.

One thing is for sure this Booker Prize. In a good field, the judges have picked the one novel to which nobody will be indifferent.