Booker Shortlist: Book #4 (Flesh)

 The Booker Prize shortlist was announced about 2 weeks go. The six books that made the cut were:

1. Susan Choi, Flashlight
2. Kiran Desai, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny
3. Katie Kitamura, Audition
4. Ben Markovits, The Rest of Our Lives
5. Andrew Miller, The Land in Winter
6. David Szalay, Flesh

I had already read Audition and The Land in Winter in my longlist tilt, and I read and reviewed The Rest of Our Lives last week. Tonight I finished the fourth book from the shortlist - David Szalay's Flesh. With four read, my front-runner for the prize is The Land in Winter, but I am aware I still have the bookie fave and heaviest hitter., The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, still to go!

Flesh is - ostensibly at least - the life story of István, aged 15 when the book opens and living with his mother in a quiet Hungarian apartment complex. The book charts the twists and turns of his life and the many unexpected detours it takes, until we finally leave István in late midlife, having come full circle back to the same place he started from.

The first thing to say about this book is that István is a weirdly affectless protagonist, with no discernible interior life. This creates a flat, hollow effect in the text, which may have been what Szalay was going for (and is at times quite interesting) but does mean it's pretty hard to get invested in his ups and downs. 

István is someone to whom things, and people, happen - quite a lot of them - but he seems to just passively go along with most of it, without measurable emotional responses in most cases. I think this can be read in two ways - either István is an incredibly stoic person with no genuine depths, or he is living a whole life in the shadow of a trauma response to the opening act of the book. The first significant portion of István's story is a reverse Lolita plot, where the 15 year old is groomed and sexually abused by a neighbour woman in her 40s. It is certainly plausible to read his subsequent closedness and lack of initiation in all his relationships as a defensive shell that he has grown around the harm done to him (which I think Szalay represents really well, showing the ambiguity and confusion of the teenage boy's responses).

That said, while I can accept the emotional flatness of István as a logical consequence of his early life, it's hard to deny that it makes for frequently incredibly repetitive and uninspiring dialogue. I think he must have said "OK", "I don't know", "Yeah" and "Sure" upwards of five hundred times each, as the sole response to questions ranging from the existential to the mundane, and wow does that get dull after a while. Because we really don't get inside his inner life (assuming he has one), it remains perplexing why the people that get attached to him really do so (especially his wife, Helen, but also several other characters). The only person that seems to crack through his shell is his son Jacob, to whom he expresses a tenderness that just isn't present for any other person or situation.

It's surprising to me that people are describing this as an immersive book - my main reservation about it, in fact, is that it denies and actively militates against immersion, with István holding the reader at a long arm's length throughout. I couldn't even get a sense of whether István was the hero or villain in his *own* mind, let alone for others (although the frank suffering that István and Helen impose on her son from her first marriage, Tom, is a fairly strong argument in favour of István-as-villain, at least in some ways). 

The ending of the book should have been devastating, but because I was so disconnected from István as a person, I found it sad, but only in a muted, distant way. And perhaps that's exactly what Szalay intended - a Camus-like outsider abstraction from the world - but for me, it wasn't enough to fall for this very interesting, but ultimately not "loveable", book.

Rating: 7/10