The Booker Review

It feels somehow fitting not to have found an appropriate quote to begin with from Flesh, given how its whole style of narrative seems so geared towards communicating… nothing much?

The story opens with an affair – if we can call it that – between a 15-year-old Hungarian named István and his much older married neighbour, whom he was asked to help with her shopping. It makes for uncomfortable reading, the details faintly grotesque and adding to an overall feeling of grubbiness; What surely amounts to full-on grooming by the neighbour is barely addressed. Strange, in fact, how little attention is drawn to this formative event later, although clearly it underpins what follows. Interesting, too, that throughout the opening chapter, no-one but István is given a name. These other characters drift by, nameless, as in a dream: “his friend,” “the lady,” “the lady’s husband.”

Our protagonist, István, is laconic in the extreme, and a high percentage of the text throughout is taken up with single-word nothingnesses (“Yeah.” “Okay.”). Occasionally an interrogative creeps in (“Yeah?”), but basically no one seems to have anything much to say of note, and life rolls on.

Yet, this novel utterly gripped me from the outset. Even starting with the typesetting choices, the down-to-earth font and wide margins, the paragraphs which barely extend past a single sentence – often even a single word. This highly unusual narrative style drives the story forward in a way I found I couldn’t look away from. How clever, to tell a dramatic story almost entirely through the medium of dialogue, but with the characters saying so little of substance. The story weaves itself unglamorously through the white space, as if the scenes are happening out of focus in the back of the shot while we are busy watching the relative emptiness in the foreground.

With each new chapter we find we have drifted forward a few years, so that just when the bare-bones narrative style starts to grate (“Okay.” “Okay?” “Sure.” “Yeah.”), something shocking happens and the tableau changes completely. We accompany István from Hungary into adulthood in the UK and life ‘s dramas follow in a somehow understated way – affairs, births, deaths – nothing causing too much of a stir. It is hard to say what István really thinks about anything, most of his utterances simply reflecting back what people say to him, yet somehow this only makes him the more intriguing.

I find it really very difficult to sum up the content of Flesh, or to explain why it fascinated me so much. The only thing left that comes to mind is a song from the hit TV show Crazy Ex Girlfriend: “If you saw a movie that was like real life, you’d be like, what the hell was that movie about?” This is the feeling I am left with at the close of Flesh. That life is messy, and there isn’t always a neat lesson to be learned. Sometimes life just… is.