David Szalay’s Flesh is a rise-and-fall tragedy in the classical tradition, but it is also, in the vein of Illusions perdues andGreat Expectations, a novel about class and mobility. It is the story of a young man who finds himself propelled into the highest spheres of society before inevitably sinking back to where he began. The remarkable thing is that Szalay seems to have a foot in both camps. He can evoke a classroom in late-Communist Hungary just as persuasively as a Conservative Party donors’ dinner. He knows the scenery of Lake Balatan as well as he does the Randolph in Oxford, with its “oblique view, through the grey veil of the lace curtains, of Magdalen Street and the Martyrs’ monument”.
The plot, with spoilers, is this: István, a fifteen-year-old who lives with his mother in a small town in Hungary, accidentally kills the husband of the neighbour with whom he is having an affair. He spends several years in jail, fights in the Iraq War, becomes a London doorman, saves the life of a man who becomes his benefactor, and finds employment as a wealthy family’s security guard. He then sleeps with his employer’s wife, marries her, and enters high society – dining with ministers, travelling in limousines, sending his son to boarding school – until an unforeseen tragedy leaves him bereft of everything, and he returns to work in a supermarket in Hungary.
The book’s unifying theme, emphasised in its episodic structure, is the significance of the turning points which can send a life in unpredictable directions. If István had never helped his neighbour with her shopping, or had taken a bus down Charing Cross Road instead of walking where he met his benefactor, or had decided on one occasion not to sleep with his employer’s wife, the events of the story could never have materialised. Even the reader finds it astonishing that the prosperous London property developer is the same man who once killed his neighbour in an obscure apartment-block. By the end, when he is a shop-worker just as if he had never left Hungary, it is as though the life he lived in the meantime was a phantom.
The prose in Szalay’s previous books, such as All That Man Is and Turbulence, often sagged with adverbs and laboured imagery. In Flesh, however, this is not a problem. Every sentence gives the impression of having been carefully polished and sharpened, like a carving knife. “It tends to be quieter on rainy nights. There’s something melancholy about them, the way people hurry along the narrow street, hidden under umbrellas. The traffic squeezes past, showing the falling rain in its headlights.” Unfortunately, the sex scenes were spared a similarly economical treatment; at least half of István’s blowjobs, however understandably enjoyable he found them, could be axed from his story without loss.
A more serious flaw than Szalay’s occasional self-indulgence is the hollowness of his minor characters. It is not just that they are less fleshed out than the protagonist, as all supporting roles must be; it is that no character diverges at all from the course of action which a thumbnail sketch of them would suggest. The young wife cheats on her older husband. The resentful stepson disinherits his stepfather. The Magdalen undergraduate becomes a drug addict. Even István’s mother, who is consistently present, exists almost totally without agency, while Mervyn, his great benefactor, is solely a plot-device.
István himself seems frustratingly passive – he is not a man who does things, but a man to whom things happen – but perhaps that is the point. If he were not so passive, the events of his life would not be so extraordinary, and the novel would become an account of the force of a personality rather than the unpredictable sequence of a life. There is a line in DH Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers which could have been the epigraph of Flesh. It runs: “Sometimes life takes hold of one, carries the body along, accomplishes one’s history, and yet is not real, but leaves oneself as it were slurred over.” That, essentially, is what Szalay is saying.
The extravagant praises which Colm Tóibín, Zadie Smith, Gary Stevenson, and seemingly all the newspapers in the country have heaped on Flesh remain open to a charge of hyperbole until more or less the end of the book. The first chapter is essentially pornography. The first third is no more than a picaresque, a string of loosely connected sexual adventures that nonetheless lack the comic brio without which no picaresque is worthwhile. Only in the middle sections does Szalay’s skill become evident; only in final sections do the full proportions of the tragedy make themselves known. By this point, having moved from Hungary to Kuwait to London and back, he has shown his understanding of an extraordinary range of social and geographical milieus. He has also, by abruptly killing off István’s son, elevated the novel into more harrowingly tragic – rather than simply picaresque – territory, in which he entirely succeeds. No doubt remains by the end that Flesh is a great novel.