It’s been a while since I’ve found a novel so compelling that I knocked off one hundred pages a day and finished reading the book in three days.
Flesh, by David Szalay, is that novel. A reviewer in The Guardian wrote that Flesh is “a novel about the Big Question: about the numbing strangeness of being alive; about what, if anything, it means to amble through time in a machine made of meat.”
The “machine made of meat” (for sure a strange definition of a human) we follow is the novel’s protagonist, Istvan. We meet him at age fifteen living in a state of detached naivety, and his story arc, told chronologically until Istvan is about age fifty, delivers him to a state of detached awareness.
The novel begins with Istvan living with his mother in Hungary as a teen. He gets pulled along reluctantly as the older woman next door seduces him, and he makes the mistake of falling in love with her, eventually leading to a confrontation with her husband, who ends up dead, with Istvan arrested.
To lessen his sentence, Istvan joins the army. He fights in Iraq, loses a friend, moves to London, works as a doorman at a strip club, and then by chance becomes the bodyguard and driver for an uber-wealthy man, Mervyn, and his wife, Helen. From there, it’s an affair with the wife, the husband gets ill and dies, Istvan marries Helen, and suddenly he’s living the life of the wealthy.
Does his good fortune last? Here is a character who wanders through his life blown by the winds of fate, and those winds are unpredictable. There is something in Istvan reminiscent of Meursault, the indifferent drifter in The Stranger, by Albert Camus.
I found the writing riveting in its apparent simplicity yet powerful effect, but at times frustrating. A reader might argue the novel is too focused on silent masculinity, or even conclude Istvan is little more than an intellectual cretin. It’s true he’s not a good conversationalist, and his appeal to others isn’t always clear.
“Yeah” and “Okay” are two of his favorite words in any scene of dialogue. Here is a page from when Mervyn is training Istvan to refine the softer skills required for his job:
There are many such exchanges throughout the book, and getting Istvan to articulate thoughts and feelings is a losing cause—but a deliberate choice on the part of Szalay that points to the confounding nature of our lives and the inability of many humans, particularly men, to articulate meaning and express their emotions.
