Overdue Booker nod brings Szalay in from the margins

A unique talent with a track record of challenging work, David Szalay creates worlds that are full of despicable characters and delectable prose

David Szalay after being named as the winner of the 2025 Booker Prize for the novel ‘Flesh’, at Old Billingsgate, London. His previous work ‘All That Man Is’ was shortlisted for the 2016 Booker and won the Gordon Burn Prize that year. Picture: Ian West/ PA

• Flesh
• David Szalay
• Jonathan Cape, €15.99

In the case of David Szalay, the Booker Prize has for years been a question of when and not if. His career, unlike many of those who populate his books, has long been on an upward trajectory.

Recently unveiled as this year’s winner for his sixth novel, Flesh, he’s been short-listed previously and can consider himself unlucky not to have claimed the Booker honours earlier.

Almost 20 years since the publication of his excellent debut novel, London and the South-East, he has consistently thrown caution to the wind and presented with a rare kind of creative bravery. 

His books deal with the vagaries of the human condition, often from the perspective of baggage-laden male leads as they struggle with the pervasiveness of the seven deadly sins. 

Now, with the Booker Prize as a calling card, expect him to come in from the margins.

Born in Quebec to Canadian and Hungarian parents, raised in London and now based in Vienna via Budapest and Paris, there’s an inter-cultural fusion to Szalay’s backstory that is reflected in many of his plot-lines. 

Travel and re-location are recurring metaphors in his work and his protagonists are forever on the move; his novels are awash with trains, planes, and automobiles.

His 2018 novel, Turbulence, for instance, uses 12 individual airline journeys to open up the stories of a dozen different travellers and, in so doing, carries the book across the globe in less than 150 pages. 

As the travellers brush past one another in cities all over the world, Szalay spectacularly sketches their locations and settings, often at the expense of dialogue. Which, as is the case with Flesh, he tends to use sparingly and disconcertingly.

Announcing Flesh as the winner of this year’s Booker Prize, Roddy Doyle, the chairperson of the judging panel, referred to the book’s “singularity”. 

We had never read anything quite like it. It is, in many ways, a dark book but it is a joy to read.

Like all of Szalay’s books, it does indeed have a dark underbelly: Some of it makes for uncomfortable reading. 

Similar to his 2016 novel, All That Man Is, it tracks a life cycle out of youth and into a world where disintegration — physical, financial, sexual — is never far away.

István, a working-class Hungarian migrant whose formative years are determined by the spectre of death, leaves the military following service in Iraq. 

After which a chance encounter in London leads him into an illicit relationship with Helen, a wealthy socialite, and consequently an unlikely career as a property magnate. 

Like several of Szalay’s protagonists, there’s a recklessness to István that doesn’t bode well: A grim inevitability envelops him.

The title — Flesh — refers to the lust that consumes István after a seedy, sexually abusive affair with an older married woman when he was a 15-year-old boy. 

But his desire isn’t only for sexual gratification. István’s second notable relationship is also with a married woman and, as his affair with Helen becomes more intense, so too does his craving for power, money, status, and control.

Portrayal of toxic masculinity in contemporary literature

The success of Flesh has led to an inevitable debate in some quarters about the portrayal of toxic masculinity in contemporary literature, and was referenced by the author during a number of recent media engagements.

Szalay said he expected “the main character in Flesh to draw quite a bit of disapproval”.

That disapproval is only compounded by the manner in which István is constructed and [under] developed by the author. 

He reveals little or nothing of consequence throughout the book and never once vouches an opinion of interest. 

And yet Szalay’s magic enables him to come alive in the silences: like several of the author’s other leads, he’s a compelling if eminently dislikeable sort who expresses himself, not with words, but with physical prowess. Often successfully but other times not.

To hammer this point home, Szalay leans bravely into the form of the novel and Flesh’s chapters are punctuated by pages and pages left blank.

Is the author asking his readers to fill in the conversational gaps themselves or to physically sketch a photo-fit of his lead character onto the empty canvas? 

Either way, the device clearly found favour with the Booker judges even if, by the end, István remains scantily drawn: we know little or nothing, for instance, about even his physical appearance.

Szalay’s loyalists — of which this writer is one — have encountered diluted flavours of István previously. 

There are shades of him, for starters, in Aleksandr, the subject of the writer’s second novel, The Innocent (2009) in which the former MGB agent spends his later years dealing with a traumatic episode from his past. 

In retirement, Aleksandr is unsettled by an uneasy recall of an incident years previously at a psychiatric facility in a remote part of Communist Russia.

There are shades of him also in James, the lead in Spring (2011), Szalay’s third novel that, like Flesh, revolves around a three-way relationship. 

And in which the laconic lead male — beset by financial concerns — is again on the go, ducking and diving. 

He finds an uneasy calm in the arms of Katherine, his on-off girlfriend, about whom his recurring concern is that she is “OK”.

In 2009, David Szalay’s debut, London and the South-East, established him as an emerging writer of imaginative contemporary fiction, as playful with the form of his books as he is with content. 

That book set the tone for most of what’s followed it, marking an arc in the distinctly below-par life of Paul Rainey, a 40-year-old, chain-smoking tele-sales worker.

Booze-addled and over-anxious, he uses the local rail system to take him from his home in Hove to his office in London, regularly under the influence.

His life is utterly mediocre, the extent of which is only amplified on his daily commute where, from the confined spaces of the rail carriage, the idea of an escape seems beyond him.

The only glamour in his life is the barmaid in one of the pubs he frequents and about whom he fantasises as a schoolboy might. 

His partner, Szalay memorably tells us, reminds him of a prostitute he once visited.

In this regard, his references are as redolent of the sleazy prose of Jarvis Cocker, the lead singer and lyricist of the pop group, Pulp, as they are of the British novelists Alan Hollinghurst and Hanif Kureishi, whose 1998 novel, Intimacy, is an obvious influence.

Magnificently written sex scenes

Szalay writes sex scenes magnificently and, in keeping with the overall tenor of his work, the physical liaisons he describes are more beige than lipstick red. 

For many of his characters, sex is simply either a duty or a box-ticking exercise and, in many of his more intimate scenes, disappointment is inevitable. 

One such tableau in Flesh, where István and Helen have telephone sex being a case in point.

Lacking any empathy whatsoever, the self-absorption of many of his characters becomes manifest in a series of pointless and ultimately hollow sexual encounters. 

But all of which, in their absolute ordinariness, make for compelling reading.

His cast may be difficult to like, but his work is impossible to ignore. There’s a rare gift to that.