By Olukorede Yishau
DAVID SZALAY is the reigning winner of the Booker Prize, an honour he received at a dinner in London for his novel, ‘Flesh’.
The novel begins with Istvan as a lonely boy living in a block of apartments in Hungary with his mother.
Istvan, who has just started a new school because they have just moved into a new town, is having challenges making friends and when he eventually makes one, he slips off his hands in no time for a reason so flimsy but common among teenagers.
Cut off his peers, he finds solace in the company of a neighour in the apartment opposite theirs, a woman old enough to be his mother. First, it is a kiss, a not-so-deep kiss. In no time, the kiss becomes French in nature. Within a short time, it stops being just a French kiss. She takes the whole of him in her mouth. And in no distant future, she has sex with him, a moment the author describes with the restraint of a writer who knows that the power of transgression lies not in its description but in its suggestion. The woman tells him, “I want to feel you inside me,” and in that line, the novel exposes its central tension: the hunger for touch and the moral decay that often accompanies it.
While the escapade is going on, Istvan’s mother holds a meeting with him. Her concern: His teachers’ complaint about his seeming distraction and his slipping grades. He insists all is well.
Meanwhile, he is also associating with the woman’s husband, who shares cigarettes with him from time to time. On an occasion, he asks: “What have you been up to?” His answer: “Nothing much.” He avoids the woman after that. But she comes looking for him and they continue their exploration of each other’s bodies. When he is not with her, he feels miserable. The time they spend together is the highlight of his days and he is ever eager to leave school.
To the woman’s surprise, he starts saying he loves her and she cautions him against saying that because she says he is too young to understand what love means, too young to fall in love with a woman in her early forties who insists she loves the man she is cheating on. He protests her love for the man, but she says the matter is too complex for his young brain to grasp. At this point, she breaks up with him and things fall apart. The only thing keeping him sane has slipped out of his control and he goes after her and she shrugs him off. So, he goes knocking at her door and he is met by her husband, who tells him she is not around, but like someone who has lost his mind, he forces his way in and a fisticuff ensues and tragedy strikes and Istvan ends up spending three years in a young offenders’ institution.
Out of jail and unable to get a job, he joins the army. He leaves the military after five years, returns to Hungary a war hero and gets employed by a winery that once rejected him. Though he has left the army, the army hasn’t left him; he soon begins seeing a therapist because of the things he saw as the aftershock of the things he saw in Iraq, especially the death of Riki, his friend, when they were on a mission to supply water to Ukrainians.
Like a rolling stone, he leaves for London, takes a job as a security man. With time he upgrades to being a private bodyguard, but a repeat of the Hungary transgression begins and, with time, it unravels like such transgression usually does, and what begins in sweetness ends in teeth gnashing.
By the time the novel ends, Istvan has morphed from the 15-year-old lonely boy of the beginning battling poverty to a full-grown man, who rises beyond lack and later falls into financial disaster.
Despite its bleakness, the author successfully steers ‘Flesh’ away from moralising. The author simply observes — the way an artist with the mind of a sociologist might, or a confessor with no power to absolve. By making Istvan a man of few words, he succeeds in letting his flesh lead in decision-making in his life. For this man who answers most enquiries with ‘yeah’, his body decides most times.
The novel raises questions about modern life, about desire, about money, about sex, about love, about work and about survival. It also tells of the class divide, especially the chasm between Europe’s rich and poor. In raising these questions, the author refuses to nudge readers in a particular direction, handing them a blank cheque to decide for themselves who to either root for or reject.
He writes with a clarity that feels almost cruel. His sentences are spare, his silences heavy. What he achieves in ‘Flesh’ is not just a story about forbidden desire, but a meditation on loneliness, on the strange bargains people, especially men, make to feel seen. The novel reminds us that the body, for all its promises of warmth, can also be the site of ruin.
With ‘Flesh’, Szalay confirms his reputation as a chronicler of contemporary disquiet. The book lingers like the aftertaste of something both sweet and unclean, a reminder that often, the things we do for flesh are the things that undo us.
He delivers a disturbing, intimate exploration of desire, loneliness, and the blurred boundaries between need and obsession.
Before ‘Flesh’, Szalay had earned a place on the Booker Prize shortlist with ‘All That Man Is’ and had already built a reputation as a quietly ambitious and psychologically astute writer. His debut novel, ‘London and the South-East’ (2008), a sharply observed portrait of a drifting salesman, won the Betty Trask Prize and marked him as a talent to watch. He followed it with ‘The Innocent’ (2009), a tense, darkly intelligent work about a young man entangled in crime, and ‘Spring’ (2011), a novel that explores disillusionment and identity through an aimless journalist. Across these early books, Szalay refined his gift for economical prose, deep interiority, and portraits of modern masculinity—qualities that would culminate in the global recognition he later received.
My final take: Our flesh, which refers to our body, has led many on the journey of no return or on journeys that nearly take their lives. So powerful is our body that many go beyond and above to please it. But, like our heart, we need to guard it because when we leave it unguarded, the end is usually catastrophic.
