Something New

We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books. 

  “FLESH” by David Szalay [Jonathan Cape publishers; $NZ38:00]

 

            When the Booker Prize is announced, many literate readers rush to the book shops hoping to find a new masterpiece. Sometimes they are rewarded with an outstanding novel, such as Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, which is still regarded as “the Booker of Bookers”. But let’s be honest. Sometimes the winner is a dud, leaving reviewers scratching their heads. This year, the Booker was won by David Szalay, still a youngish man, born in Canada with a Jewish mother and a Hungarian father, raised in England, went to Oxford and now [says the blurb] lives in Vienna. He has written five previous novels, but now comes Flesh. And, as usual, some reviewers proclaim it as a masterpiece while others think it is appalling. Let me be neutral at first as I dive into the book.

            Running to 349 pages, Flesh begins as a shocker. In Hungary, Istvan is a teenager – all of fifteen. He is seduced by a woman about forty who makes use of him when her husband is not around. She bonks him this way and that way and her over him and him over her and under the bed and over the bed and in positions you’ve never heard of and really kinky stuff. This means that the first thirty pages read like sheer pornography. Dear reader, it is not a novel to give to your nice granny for Christmas.  Anyway, naïve teenager Istvan thinks he has found the love of his life; so he gets a big shock when the woman tells him to get lost as her husband comes back. She has really used him as a sex-toy. Istvan finds it hard to believe. In a scuffle on the stairwell he shoves the husband down the stairs. The husband hits his head and is killed. Istvan, being a juvenile, is not locked up in jail but it sent to a reform school for three years.

So what do we, as readers, immediately understand? That, in Istvan’s mind,  love is less important but sex [i.e. bonking] is necessary, or at least that is the way Istvan sees it. And that being the case, women are mainly there to be used. They are flesh only. I read it, that is why the novel is called Flesh. Men are also to be used to, but only when they can help him get ahead. No softness in the eye of a cynic.

            I will deliberately give you a very brief synopsis only as this long story unravels. Being out of the institute for young offenders, Istvan gets a boring job, tries to get girls, doesn’t really get anywhere, and finally joins the army.

He’s in the army for five years, on N.A.T.O’s peace-keeping missions. He sees a mate getting badly hurt. Along comes a sort of battle fatigue. How does he deal with this? Taking illicit drugs of course, and with his mate chasing available girls [okay – young women, but you know what I mean].  He’s left the army. Where can he find a job? He goes to London and gets a job as a bouncer at a sleazy strip-joint in Soho.

Dead end, right? Nope. Because fortuitously novelists can create events that will keep the protagonist going. Istvan, now a strong and muscular man and capable of fighting, rescues a man who is being beaten up by thugs.

The man – Karl Nyman – happens to be a multimillionaire. Nyman pays professionals to show Istvan how to deal with polite society in London, how to fend off thugs, and in effect how to become Nyman’s body-guard. Nyman also makes Istvan his wife’s chauffeur. She is called Helen. Nyman and Helen have a little son called Thomas.

Behind Nyman’s back, Helen and Istvan begin to have an affair. More bonking and bonking and bonking. And Nyman the tycoon, who can pull strings where money is concerned, becomes racked with cancer. And goes to hospital. And dies. And Helen and Istvan marry and then have a baby called Jacob.

So Istvan is now a wealthy, flashy entrepreneur and property developer, almost top of the crowd. But there is one major snag. Young Thomas, son of Nyman and Helen, is now a pot-smoking, drugs-injecting student at Oxford. He always hated Istvan and he now understands that, according to a trust, all Nyman’s money should really come to him and not be wasted by Istvan and….

Oh stop, stop, stop!!

I have gone as far as I can because, as I have often noted, I do not give away how newly-minted novels end. And I have ignored what nuance and subtlety there is in this novel.

First, I think we are meant to see Istvan as a man who had in part been warped by his adolescent experience. He might have begun thinking he had found something vaguely like love, but his experience soured him, not helped by his further experience in the army. Yet he is not wholly insensitive. He gradually likes his little boy Jacob, although the little boy doesn’t entirely like him.

Second, in the passages where Istvan is making money, being the tycoon, dealing with other property developers in London and going to extravagant parties, David Szalay is clearly showing us the sheer nastiness of the crass upper-classes. Like mere sex, making money has little to do with real love. Yet at the same time, we can understand that Istvan in a way, coming from an impoverished  background, at least tried to climb the greasy pole, tryed to get to the top…. But again, hasn’t David Szalay made it a little too easy to get him to the top, what with the woman [Helen] who neatly puts him in her bed? Contradictions, contradictions.

Flesh is written throughout in the present tense. The language is largely simple. Many pages are written in a series of statements [sentences] rather than in paragraphs. As for Istvan, he has a very limited vocabulary. When he speaks he says little more than “Yeah” and “Okay”. For many, this will make for an easy read. I have found some reviews that see Istvan as a macho man and the epitome of such men. Surely there are such men and Flesh could be read as a kind of documentary.

As I said at the beginning of this review, some people have hailed Flesh as a work of brilliance; and others wonder why this year’s Booker judges bothered with it.