Opinion In David Szalay’s Booker Prize-winning novel ‘Flesh’, the ways of men

The book we kept coming back to, the one that stood out from the other great novels”, is how writer Roddy Doyle, chair of judges, described this year’s Booker Prize-winning novel Flesh by Hungarian-British writer David Szalay. Szalay’s protagonist, István, drifts from Hungarian adolescence to military service and London exile, his movements slow and sparse, his silences louder than speech, his singularity coded in the writer’s refusal to make his character stand for anything larger than his own faltering life.

What the Vienna-based Szalay, 51, achieves, in the process, is not a grand statement on masculinity, but an exposure of its architecture — its weight, absences, its quiet humiliations, its undeniable hubris. The novel’s power lies in how it unravels the idea of the man as an actor with agency, asking instead what happens when he is acted upon. There is no redemption arc, no moral lesson. Szalay dismantles the myths of masculinity not by correcting them but by ignoring their frame altogether. His men are not more or less. They simply are, in body and flesh.

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At a time when conversations around toxic and performative masculinity dominate both culture and critique, Szalay’s refusal to join the chorus or offer a prescription or remedy feels both unsettling and subversive. His fourth novel, the Booker-shortlisted All That Man Is (2016), too, had mapped stages of manhood. Flesh stands out for its attention to the texture of existence, for restoring to fiction a kind of moral depth that chooses ambiguity over certainty. It makes Szalay’s sixth novel, in Doyle’s words, “a dark book but… a joy to read” — a novel not just about men, but about what remains of them and of the rest, when language, certainty and myth are stripped away.