Samuel Butler’s 1903 novel The Method of All Flesh carried with it an implied subtitle. Within the e book of Kings, from which Butler drew his title, the dying David tells his son Solomon, “take thou braveness and shew thyself a person”. Butler’s inference was clear sufficient: here’s a e book about what it means to dwell, what it means to die, and what is perhaps a worthwhile technique to fill the time in between.
Flesh, the sixth e book from Booker-shortlisted David Szalay, has greater than only a biblical allusion in frequent with Butler’s masterpiece. Thrillingly, in an age once we arguably have weaker stomachs for such issues, it additionally shares its daring ontological and inventive ambitions. In Flesh, Szalay has written a novel concerning the Massive Query: concerning the numbing strangeness of being alive; about what, if something, it means to amble by means of time in a machine manufactured from meat.
The novel recounts the lifetime of István, whom we meet as a psychologically remoted and taciturn teenager and comply with till he’s a psychologically remoted and taciturn middle-aged man. The intervening years see István pulled alongside by the undertows of life; an affair with an older neighbour that ends in tragedy and violence, a stretch serving within the navy, the uprooting of his life from Hungary to London, a vertiginous climb up the British class strata and, in the end, a stoic and melancholy return to the city the place he grew up.
Crucially, there may be exactly nothing of the agentive, questing hero in István’s journey. Szalay has rendered a man buffeted by forces past his management, be they the erotic or materials wishes of those that encompass him, the undulations of the worldwide economic system or the interventionist and racialised overseas coverage of the European Union. A persistently phlegmatic and passive participant within the occasions of his life and the occasions of the broader world, István has one thing of the existential wayfarer about him – Camus’ Meursault meets Forrest Gump.
Over the course of the novel, the character and implications of István’s pliability are step by step revealed. He begins with a indifferent however curious naivety, uncertain what pleasures life may bestow on him however keen to silently put one foot in entrance of the opposite till he finds out. However over time, this hardens, first into phlegmatic acceptance, and later into an nearly eerie resignation. Earlier than lengthy, István appears totally alienated from his personal wishes, a ghost haunting the sides of a life that he’s not even positive is his. Within the palms of a much less skilful author, this might sound a predictable trajectory, the incremental retrenchment of a thoughts and a coronary heart within the face of ache. However as an alternative, Szalay provides us one thing much more disquieting: the creeping implication that maybe István will not be engaged in an act of psychospiritual retreat, however is as an alternative reckoning, in a clear-eyed and cheap manner, with the fact of destiny’s chilly indifference.
Nonetheless, the sense of psychological, social and emotional detachment that pervades the novel does have one notable counterweight. From the title on, Szalay ensures the reader by no means forgets that, for all his otherworldly take away, István exists in a physique: whereas he might not articulate his wishes verbally, they nonetheless exist. Whether or not it’s his disfiguring urge for violence, or his disorienting and sometimes ennobling urge for sexual launch, it’s by means of these acts, usually sudden and stunning, that we get closest to understanding what may lie beneath his silence. It’s telling that István appears most energised in the course of the interval of his life he spends at struggle. Whereas his expertise is in the end outlined by trauma on the battlefield and the monumental futility of the “struggle on terror”, we additionally sense that for István it takes the proximity and imminence of demise, the simple confrontation along with his mortality, to render the world significant and vivid. On this sense, Flesh is a novel that steadily reminds us how usually movement precedes emotion.
Stylistically, Flesh is all bone. Szalay has all the time been a grasp of the flinty, spare sentence however on this novel he has pared issues again much more brutally. Over 350 pages or so, the cumulative impact is certainly one of managed, austere minimalism, a sequence of thumbnail sketches that recommend exactly the wanted quantity of element. Dialogue is dealt with equally, staccato exchanges that solely not often erupt into exclamation. When István is requested the way it felt to be within the military, to see folks die and to shoot a gun, he lastly settles on “it was OK”. At occasions, Szalay’s writing is harking back to Henry Inexperienced’s nice modernist trilogy, Loving, Residing, Get together Going, the place stylistic flatness is deployed with an depth that’s nearly comedian, such that the very concept of significant emotional connection known as into query – rendered absurd.
There will probably be a temptation to pigeonhole Flesh as a novel about masculinity; its silences and its contortions, its frustrations and its codes. However whereas that’s clearly a central concern, Szalay can also be grappling with broader, knottier, extra metaphysical points. As a result of, at its coronary heart, Flesh is about extra than simply the issues that go unsaid: additionally it is about what’s basically unsayable, the ineffable issues that sit on the centre of each life, hovering past the attain of language.
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In István, Szalay has given us an unusually, confrontationally sincere protagonist; one who accepts the vagaries of life as being outdoors his locus of management, and who says so little as a result of he senses that when all is claimed and achieved, phrases are a woefully insufficient device for the job.
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