A man adrift

You’d be forgiven for thinking you must approach Flesh, the latest novel by British-Hungarian author David Szalay, with a certain steely disposition. Since winning the Booker Prize in November, the novel has sparked an avalanche of commentary over its potentially “problematic” male protagonist, István, and whether it is to be read as a valorisation or condemnation of “toxic masculinity”.

“Not OK?” asks Lanre Bakare at The Guardian, fretting over what Flesh might reveal about our alleged “crisis in masculinity” and the deep evils of Andrew Tate and incel forums  — the 2020s equivalent of violent video games and heavy metal music. No need to panic, reassures Josiah Gogarty at GQ, who insists the novel “isn’t here to save the lit bros” and that this doesn’t signal a literary trend back to masculinity or male themes. 

Apparently, celebrating a male author writing about a male protagonist is now so perilous an endeavour that one must tread carefully. Szalay himself anticipated the backlash in his Booker acceptance speech, calling Flesh “a risky novel” sensing that his book would be morally challenging for a contemporary readership.

Before praising the book itself — and it deserves praise —  I have to pause to express my bewilderment that Flesh sparked controversy at all. The story of István, a Hungarian national, who we follow from his teenage years into middle age through a series of lovers, occupations and tragedies — is not a transgressive narrative, nor is it dripping in machismo. If anything, István displays an understated refinement, particularly in the latter parts of the novel, quite uncharacteristic of a male of his class and background. Flesh is “about masculinity” only in the sense it is about a male, experiencing the world as a male would. More accurately, Flesh is best described as a realist novel exploring fate and misfortune, albeit told through a clever idiosyncratic style.

Something deeply disordered is occurring in modern publishing and readership if this kind of honest, gentle storytelling is what counts as “risky”. We are living through a literary crisis, where most of society — particularly the young — are so barely literate, at least in the higher forms of reading, that trawling through one novel a year is a strain. For our literary elite to then be composed of miserable know-it-alls, frothing at the mouth to categorise any praiseworthy book as either for or against the moral arc of history, is an incredibly dire state of affairs.   

What makes Flesh so refreshing, then, is how little it conforms to the socio-political traps laid for it. We first encounter István at the age of 15, where he begins a sexual relationship with his 40-something neighbour. This experience is confusing and troubling for the boy as he is awkwardly seduced into manhood. Rather than relishing in moralism, the style of Flesh is distinguished by its excessive externality, relying on stilted, realistic dialog where ambiguities are allowed to fester. Take this exchange between István and his older lover:

‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I really didn’t think this would happen.’

‘What?’

‘How you feel,’ she says.

‘That I love you?’ he says.

‘You don’t.’

‘Yes I do.’

István is a young man of few words, frequently responding “Okay”, “Yes” or “I don’t know” to others, often women, in his life. Readers share their frustration, wanting to pry open the young man’s brain for more answers. Szalay, cleverly but sadistically, resists the temptation. This monosyllabic register persists into adulthood, as István displays a chronic passivity in the face of hardship. The phrase “Okay” is less a sign of inarticulateness than an ingrained fatalism that one must simply grin and bear whatever comes next. 

Events progress rapidly in Flesh as months, even years, are swallowed between chapters. After a stint in juvenile detention, István joins the military and then settles into work as a driver where he begins an illicit affair with a wealthy married woman. István maintains his vacant outlook throughout, without any indication he has been shaped or bruised by circumstance. We observe as he observes.

It’s in these descriptions that the meaning behind the title Flesh becomes apparent. István spends much of the novel merely as a body, as a piece of meat handled and packaged by institutions and lovers. Sociologist Anthony Giddens once described modernity as a “runaway juggernaut” — a giant mechanical contraption speeding forward without anyone in the driver’s seat. It is in this context that István finds himself flung across countries, from Iraq to London as well as social classes.

It is not that he is incapable of struggle, indeed his capacity for violence is established early on. But why resist? And for whom?

It would be easy (and stupid) to describe István as an emotionally repressed man who simply needs to learn to better articulate his feelings. He is instead a tragic figure yearning for stability and warmth whilst facing an unrelating tumult of forces beyond his grasp. To be “flesh” is to be never quite at peace. Beautifully and tragically, it is once István becomes a father and has a settled family life that we see a more dogged will to truly live and thrive. Fate however, is still not done with him.

The true radical essence of Flesh is not that it depicts a masculine perspective, but that it demands a willingness to inhabit ambiguity and to accept the quiet devastation of a life that never quite coheres. It asks us to look at a man who tries to love, tries to endure, tries simply to remain upright and still fails. There is no moral message here, Flesh stands as an unexpectedly humanist novel, one that recognises our persistent longing for meaning even as it slips perpetually beyond our reach.