In February, The Observer asked David Szalay how he felt in 2016 when he missed out on winning the Booker prize – by the slenderest of margins, according to whispers – after making the shortlist for his novel All That Man Is. He replied that he had managed to convince himself that not winning was a good thing: “If I’d won ... maybe I’d have become lazy. It feels like some big peak to come back from.”
Now he looks down from that very summit, having won this year’s prize for his latest novel Flesh. For the panel of five judges, the choice was unanimous. The chair – the novelist Roddy Doyle – told journalists that, after a final meeting lasting more than five hours, he hadn’t even needed to ask for a show of hands. “It’s not like any other book,” he said, remarking that whenever discussion turned to Szalay’s novel, he noticed his fellow judges sitting up a bit straighter, smiling.
As Doyle acknowledged, that might sound peculiar given that Flesh is such a dark book, shaped by illicit sex and the scars of violence. A tale of masculinity, money and migration beginning in the 1990s, it gives us nine snapshots in the tumultuous life of a Hungarian ex-convict, István, who settles in the UK after serving in Iraq. As Szalay told me earlier this year, the story isn’t remotely autobiographical, but was born in part from his feeling of dislocation between London (where he grew up) and Hungary, his father’s birthplace, and his own home until recently. Szalay (pronounced Sol-loi) now lives in Vienna.
But the singularity remarked upon by the Booker judges lies neither in the novel’s crunchy themes nor its abundance of drama, but the clean, spare style in which Szalay writes. What he omits is as important as what he includes: the episodic structure, leaping between moments of István’s life, generates addictive momentum, and there’s steady electricity in the novel’s plain-spoken sentences, rich in implication. Szalay’s expert use of close third-person narration – telling the story from outside the protagonist’s head but with access to his thoughts – makes us feel that we know István even as he remains inscrutably blank. His mix of naivety and wisdom – made streetwise by harsh experience yet taken advantage of everywhere he goes – is poignant, sometimes even comic, and the effect is very subtle. Doyle batted away a journalist’s question about Flesh being “too male” by noting that our sense of István often comes from how he’s observed by women.
For the panel of five judges, the choice was unanimous. Chair Roddy Doyle said he hadn’t even needed to ask for a show of hands
Assessing the shortlist last month, I called Flesh a great book that doesn’t quite stick the landing. I still think that. Death, always stalking its pages, finally arrives unguessably close to home in a way that steals the breath yet feels too convenient. Szalay’s method of building a novel out of discrete episodes was arguably more effective in All That Man Is, a collage of moments in the life of nine different protagonists, and a book that more elegantly ducked the task of writing an actual ending. But Flesh is a deserving winner – and Szalay has no obvious rival as a stylist in British fiction right now.
Flesh by David Szalay (Jonathan Cape, £18.99). Order a copy at The Observer Shop for £16.14. Delivery charges may apply
Portrait by Jonas Matyassy