2025 Booker Prize winner
There’s no denying the audacity of Flesh, last year’s Booker Prize winner. It begins with a genuinely shocking set of events, which promises psychological depth and long-reaching consequences for the life of István, a working class teenage boy in Hungary. In the early pages, I found myself utterly compelled by how such a bombshell of events might echo throughout István’s life, shaping his decisions, relationships, and sense of self.
Yet as the novel unfolds, to me that promise feels only partially realised. This is a minimalist novel, with grief often depicted by white space. István is not a man of many words. Rather than a deepening exploration of István’s character, we are presented with a man who drifts passively through life: from his youth, to prison, to the army, to a world of violence and eventually to the life of the super rich in London. To me it seems as though he moves from one episode of his life to the next with absolute passivity. The emotional and moral reverberations hinted at in the opening never quite land with the force I had anticipated.
Or maybe that’s the whole point. Maybe István the man is rendered incapable of any introspection following what happened to him as a teenager. Perhaps there is something deliberate in this sparse portrayal. But I found myself wanting more: more evolution, more sense that the events of his life truly mattered to him.
In the end, Flesh is a novel I admired more than I liked. Although I did enjoy it, I closed it with a slight sense of disappointment, immediately wondering what others thought of it. What will you think?
Jennie
Buy it here: Flesh a book by David Szalay – Bookshop.org UK