The Booker Review

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  • Week 4: Flesh (David Szalay)

    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.

  • Week 3: Love Forms (Claire Adam)

    “In the darkness, the fallen coconuts all around us glimmered like skulls.”

    A girl is smuggled across the water from Trinidad to Venezuela, in the bottom of a boat, in the middle of the night. Why? And who is she?

    Thus opens Love Forms, full of promise. Then, the story quickly becomes… surprisingly uneventful? The narrative reads like a memoir, plodding along in a pedestrian way through the protagonist’s mundane family life; all description no dialogue. I will admit to finding the scenery a bit difficult to wade through at times.

    We meet Dawn, a 58-year old white Trinidadian woman now living in the UK: divorced, two grown-up sons. As we unwrap the layers of story that brought her here, we come to understand that she herself is trying to piece together what has happened to her, as she searches for a daughter whom she was made to adopt out as a teenager.

    Central to the tale is the theme of motherly relationships. Through Dawn’s eyes, we see her pursuit of the long-lost daughter set against present-day interactions with her sons, and her relationship with her own mother. I am struck by a feeling of terrible isolation as Dawn tries to navigate this search – it’s not that it’s a secret, per se, it’s just that no one will talk about it with her. Father, mother, estranged husband, brothers, son: all want to pretend it didn’t happen.

    I found the relationship between Dawn and her mother particularly interesting, how it develops. Things seeming one way and being another. Her mother driving solutions when clearly Dawn just wants sympathy, wants permission to be struggling – with work, kids, living far from home. Her husband’s unsupportiveness and father’s complete lack of empathy for her situation (“Well, if you want to work, then work!”) are painful to watch at times, and she doesn’t appear to have any real friends. Loneliness skulks in the bushes, never quite mentioned, but palpable all the same.

    In the margins of the story, we get to take a tour of a 1980s Trinidadian upbringing; the trees laden with fruit, the sounds of carnival ringing into the night. This was probably my favourite aspect of the book, getting to learn some of the history and culture of this unfamiliar corner of the world. (Did you know that Trinidad experienced a coup in the 90s? I didn’t!)

    The central riddle of the story (where is this daughter?) persists on and on. And yet, the strength of Dawn’s longing for the daughter seems to subside a little as she finally feels the warmth of her family huddling around to support her in her Sisyphean quest. Perhaps that is what she was really searching for all this time.

  • Week 2: The South (Tash Aw)

    “I was about to turn seventeen, and at that age, what did I really know about time?”

    The South is, at its heart, a touching coming-of-age story set among a Chinese immigrant family in 1990s Malaysia.

    The book opens (perhaps slightly jarringly?) with a liaison between its two young male protagonists, Jay and Chuan. I found this an interesting choice, seeming to interrupt the crescendo of the will-they won’t-they furtive-glances motif which comes later – though I must admit, despite this, I was utterly hooked by page 40. The atmosphere feels electric with promise, even though we think we already know where it ends.

    In the spirit of Call Me By Your Name, we follow Jay and Chuan as they explore the rural surrounds of a farm (inherited by Jay’s mother; worked by Chuan’s father), one formative summer in their youth. The story knits together cleverly in a style reminiscent of The Bee Sting (Paul Murray’s novel of Booker Prize 2023 shortlisting), as we slowly discover the parallels and intricately linked relations of the two men’s lives and families, and how everyone is struggling in their own ways. We see fascinating glimpses of Malaysian history and the social mores of a previous era through the lens of the parents, contrasted with a splash of modernity in the form of Jay’s sisters, riding around on motorbikes and rebelling against their elders with cigarettes and life plans. We hear the boys oppressed by a deeply homophobic society; the women cornered by patriarchal structures.

    A lack of chapter titles – or even numbers – gives the storytelling a timeless quality, the prose sprawling on languidly like the Southern summer, while the fluidly changing narrators and viewpoints left me a little disoriented, as if wandering in a heat haze. And I found the dialogue very The Little Prince (probably my all-time favourite book) – that is to say – philosophical in a beautifully simplistic way: tales of learning how to human, learning how to relate to other humans.

    And, reading this book in a heatwave, I found the splashing lake scenes quite refreshing, the scenery so immersive.

    One small detail that slightly bothered me (as a notorious pedant for details!) was the older sister’s constant texting of a boyfriend. Although never quite stated, from context I dated the story to between the Asian Markets Crash of 1997 and the Millenium – but (perhaps except for business-people) I didn’t think mobile phones took off till at least the early 2000s? So that stood out to me as anachronistic. Maybe I missed something – or maybe we’ll chalk it down to the slightly-unsettling, weaving-around-in-time quality of the narration leaving me lost in sequencing.

    Even more than its observations about youth and how we learn to be in the world, this book has something poignant to say about siblingship, I feel. Jay realises gently of his middle sister: “Whatever closeness we had experienced in our shared existence up to that point would not be enough to prevent our lives from pulling inevitably in opposite directions”. Perhaps there is something resonant here about the enchantment of a childhood Summer and the people who were important to us.

    Overall the story left me with a warm, bittersweet yet hopeful glow. “How wonderful”, says Jay, “ that something could be simultaneously dying and striving to stay alive”. There is a certain magic in learning about the World.

  • Week 1: Universality (Natasha Brown)

    “The personal is anything that affects me. Everything else is political. And identity politics is whatever affects you, but not me.”

    What is the zeitgeist of these strange times, and what “universality” of human experience does it point to?

    This is, I think, the central premise of Brown’s second novel, its cast of characters to my eye deeply unlikeable, yet somehow fascinating. The story opens with a fictional magazine article charting an incident in which Jake, an anti-capitalist squatter at a farm commune calling themselves “The Universalists,” has attacked another member of his commune with a gold bar. (Yes, we see the irony.) In turn, we delve deeper by following Hannah, the struggling journalist who wrote the article; Richard, the philandering banker who owns the farm; and Lenny, mother of Jake and affair partner of Richard, whose own popular writings are successfully channelling the anti-“woke” backlash of the current political climate. Perhaps everything is not quite as it seems.

    Capitalism is really nonsense, isn’t it?

    This is both an underlying thread of the book and a thought I have frequently had whilst being unable to work this year. The rise of pointless work to plug the gaps filled by technological advances irritates me as much as the constant newspaper commentary panicking at the prospect of AI “taking” all the jobs. If computers can now do most of the hard work that actually needs doing for humans to live, why aren’t we receiving the gift of time and leisure rather than making up more work simply for the sake of keeping busy? And why are we constantly annoyed at each other rather than the ridiculous societal prisons that bind us? This story manages to capture perfectly the general misunderstanding of the word “privilege” which I sometimes suspect is fuelling the current anti-diversity backlash: No-one wants to be told they have an easy life.

    Interestingly, the only one who isn’t really given their own voice in the narrative is Jake, the idealist and would-be attacker. Utterly rejected by his mother and cowering in a corner from the consequences of his youthful mistakes, I am left feeling rather sorry for Jake, wishing his choice of “living off the land” without the bullshit jobs of the modern economy could still be possible.

    “We all want to be a little offended, don’t we?” muses Lenny, finally, on stage at her literary festival. I certainly found the preachy anti-diversity tone of this story deliciously angrifying, chiming beautifully with the “rage bait” model of the way we receive information in the modern world. Perhaps what it tells us about “universality” is how unlikeable we all are, sniping at each other over politics and grand ideals, while stupidly sacrificing ourselves to the master of Capitalism.