Should David Szalay’s Flesh have won the Booker Prize?

David Szalay’s “Flesh” is “almost certainly the most monosyllabic Booker prizewinner ever”, said Johanna Thomas-Corr in The Times. The brooding protagonist, István, largely speaks in “gruff, gruntish ‘yeahs’, ‘nos’ and ‘okays’”, giving the book the “terse narrative style of a thriller”.

It is also perhaps the “blokiest winner” in the literary award’s history, exploring masculinity in a way that will likely appeal to that “elusive creature, the 21st-century male reader of novels”.

‘Timely anxieties’

“This year’s shortlist was a strong one”, said Martin Chilton in The Independent. Each of the “experienced” authors tackled the “theme of identity” in one way or another – but none managed it more “compellingly” than Szalay, whose “urgent and honest 349-page novel taps into timely anxieties about manhood”.

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The tale begins in Hungary, where 15-year-old István is living with his mother in a block of flats. Emotionally detached and struggling to fit in, he joins the military and is stationed in Kuwait before moving to London where he works first as a bouncer and then as a driver for the super-rich.

Covering a wide range of themes from teenage sex to infidelity, “everyday struggles” to murder, each chapter is “almost a self-contained unit”. Szalay writes with a “terse precision”, in a prose that is “pared to the bone” yet “deeply affecting”. What makes the book “so hypnotic” is his ability to bring his “introverted” protagonist to life, examining “profound questions about what drives an existence”, and “what sometimes shatters it”.

A novel that deserves “more than one encounter”, it’s a “startling, heartbreaking read”. The “most deserved Booker winner” since Douglas Stuart’s “Shuggie Bain” in 2020, it was the “right choice” by this year’s judges.

Cutting us off from István’s thoughts and emotions is a “risky strategy” said Justine Jordan in The Guardian, but the “narrative flatness hugely pays off”. The “yawning gaps” in the text draw us in, encouraging us to “solve the puzzle” of the protagonist. A “propulsive page-turner”, its “originality makes it a novel you will think about as well as feel, like a gut punch, in your body”.

‘Decent’ enough

“I’d wager” that many commentators will love “Flesh”, said Cal Revely-Calder in The Telegraph. “They’re all wrong.” Szalay’s novel is “decent” enough – “but it wasn’t the best book on the shortlist. That was Kiran Desai’s ‘The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny’, closely followed by Andrew Miller’s ‘The Land in Winter’”. Their prose is “wholly engrossing”, whereas Szalay “didn’t impress me so much”.

His winning tale “wasn’t half the book it could have been”. István’s thoughts are “framed plainly and clearly” and the novel “almost found a second gear that would have tempered the numbness, the aridity. Frustratingly, it never quite did.” Szalay’s winning book will receive much praise, but as a reader nothing beats being “electrified by good prose”. Roddy Doyle, chair of this year’s Booker jury, said “Flesh” was “not like any other book”. “It would be nice if that were true.”

“Is ‘Flesh’ the best of the shortlist?” said Thomas-Corr in The Times. Right from the opening pages it “ensnared me”, and “I’ve been raving about Szalay’s clean, elegant prose ever since”. I admit, though, I have a “soft spot” for Andrew Miller, “one of Britain’s most underrated novelists”. Still, I expect “Flesh” will be a “commercial hit”, and should finally park the “hoary old claim that the male novelist stands no chance of success any more”.