This is the first of six posts in which we look in detail at the six writers shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize, the winner to be announced on Monday, 10 November.
Exploring Austerity and Exteriority: David Szalay, Flesh, and the Craft of the Modern European Novel
David Szalay (born 1974) has solidified his position as one of the most structurally innovative and thematically resonant chroniclers of contemporary European existence. His work frequently centres on themes of isolation, economic precarity, and modern masculinity. For any writer seeking to understand how to approach vast, complex transnational subjects or how to wield stylistic austerity to profound emotional effect, Szalay’s career, particularly his 2025 novel Flesh, offers essential, challenging lessons.
Szalay’s critical stature is already impressive, having been named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists in 2013 and appearing on The Telegraph’s list of the top 20 British writers under 40 in 2010. His debut novel, London and the South-East (2008), which drew partially on his early career experience in business-to-business telesales, won both the Betty Trask Prize and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. However, his status as a prominent international literary figure was cemented by his sustained recognition from the Booker Prize Foundation. His 2016 work, All That Man Is, which explores European masculinity in crisis, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Following this success, his novel Flesh was shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2025, confirming him as a twice-shortlisted author and affirming his influence in contemporary fiction.
The Framework of Transnational Identity
Szalay’s biography provides the foundational context for his thematic preoccupations with movement and geography. He was born in Montreal, Canada, the son of a Hungarian father and a Canadian mother. His family life involved continuous geographic relocation during his early years, including moving to Beirut and then to London after being forced to leave Lebanon due to the onset of the Lebanese Civil War. Although he grew up primarily in the UK and studied at the University of Oxford, he later resided in Brussels, Pécs, and Budapest, before finally settling in Vienna. This complex, continuous geographic movement makes it difficult to pin a fixed nationality on him, although he is often identified as having Hungarian and British roots.
This composite, shifting biography is far from anecdotal; it determines the essential framework for his writing career. His work focuses heavily on the movement of people and capital across the continent. His core literary interests are direct reflections of this complex transnational identity, revolving around topics such as the local effects of a globalising economy, the rewards and costs of intimacy, and the past and future of Europe. The novel Flesh, in particular, delves into the cultural and economic divides characteristic of an ever-globalising Europe, specifically detailing the journey of a Hungarian immigrant crossing the EU’s internal borders.
Structural Evolution: From Conventional Narrative to the Collage-Novel
Szalay’s literary output demonstrates a distinct evolution in structure, moving from more conventional narratives towards fragmented, collage-like compositions, before ultimately synthesising these approaches in Flesh.
His first published works adhered largely to traditional novelistic forms. London and the South-East (2008) focuses intently on a single character, Paul Rainey, a man defined by a painful knot of self-hatred. This debut work established Szalay’s enduring preoccupation with the isolated, miserable male protagonist, illustrating the difficulties of chasing commercial leads and the dehumanising aspects of work. This early period also included the publication of The Innocent (2009) and Spring (2011). Spring was noted explicitly for the literary skill it displayed in depicting non-closure and emotional ambiguity, with one reviewer describing Szalay’s ability to write with brilliance about twilight
A pivotal moment in Szalay’s career arrived when he consciously challenged the constraints of traditional narrative structure. His works All That Man Is (2016) and Turbulence demonstrated a marked preference for segmented forms, where individual stories are carefully linked to form a coherent whole.
Szalay himself was emphatic that All That Man Is should not be considered merely a collection of stories but rather a unified collage-novel, a work explicitly designed to coalesce in the reader’s mind. The book is composed of nine segments, each one following a distinct European man, with each subsequent protagonist being five to ten years older than the last, spanning various ages and professions across the continent. This deliberate, chronological structure illustrates the notion of the Three Ages of Man. By making all nine protagonists male, Szalay intended for them to aggregate into a single composite protagonist, unifying the book thematically. This structure demanded that the reader perform significant imaginative work in the gaps between the segments, allowing Szalay to cover a vast amount of human experience without relying on the structural demands of a lengthy 19th-century novel.
He achieved a similar, expansive effect in Turbulence, which won the Edge Hill Prize. This work is a collection of twelve stories linked by the chain of passengers on a series of intercontinental flights. The structure deliberately emphasises shared mortality and global interconnection, an idea reflected in the JFK quote encountered by the final character: our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. This approach demonstrates Szalay’s consistent desire to achieve universality through multiplicity, creating a collective portrait that illustrates a shared human experience rather than detailing the life of just one individual.
Flesh (2025) marks a crucial structural refocus, returning to a narrative that follows a single main character, István. This choice was essential due to the specific themes of the book, which necessitated charting how decisive, specific experiences — particularly traumatic and sexual events — alter the long-term trajectory of one individual’s life.
Despite the shift back to a singular protagonist, the novel retains the episodic sensibility of his fragmented works, divided into ten chronological chapters. Critics have described Flesh as the most novelistic of his recent books, while simultaneously noting that it still utilises the formal gaps that Szalay values, allowing the reader to fill in transitional periods. This synthesis of approach allows the author to trace the subtle yet profound effect of the past on the present.
We can contrast the two major approaches Szalay has used: in All That Man Is, the protagonist was a composite, featuring nine separate men in sequential age progression across Europe. The narrative goal was universality through multiplicity, presenting an expansive survey of continental experience. The primary theme was European masculinity in crisis, alongside shared longing and inarticulateness. In contrast, Flesh has a singular protagonist, István, whose life is charted through a chronological journey. The primary theme shifts to ontological existence, defined as being a machine made of meat, and István’s passive response to external forces and trauma. The pacing is propulsive and focused, following the tides of money and power, with a narrative goal of achieving depth through exteriority and physicality.
Szalay’s narrative technique is defined by an austere minimalism, a highly cinematic execution, and a fundamental structural reliance on exteriority. These elements collectively generate emotional tension through careful observational distance and controlled omission.
The author is celebrated widely for his formal restraint, often described as a master of the flinty, spare sentence. In Flesh, this aesthetic approach has been pared things back even more brutally, resulting in a novel characterised by controlled, austere minimalism. The prose is highly compressed and elliptical, employing terse language to convey precisely the needed amount of detail. Dialogue is frequently unconventional and stunted, actively minimising explicit emotional exchange between characters.
This stylistic flatness of the prose has been likened to Henry Green’s modernist fiction, where such austere deployment serves to question the very possibility of meaningful emotional connection, sometimes resulting in an intensity that approaches the absurd. Crucially, this minimalist style serves a crucial thematic function: it structurally mirrors István’s internal world, characterising him as a man barely on speaking terms with his own feelings. The style reflects his fundamental belief that words are a woefully inadequate tool for confronting existential reality.
For writers, Szalay’s use of cinematic technique is particularly instructive. He frequently acknowledges the strong influence of film on his literary craft, citing directors such as Eric Rohmer and Alfred Hitchcock. His application of filmic strategy is crucial for generating tension in his novels.
Szalay employs a Hitchcockian mechanism where a story begins by immediately revealing a key piece of information or a dramatic moment, then temporarily retreats, only to lead up to it again. This deliberate narrative manipulation fundamentally changes the nature of the reader’s engagement. Rather than focusing on the ‘what’s going to happen next?’ — a question Szalay deems two-dimensional — the tension shifts compellingly to how will it happen and how the characters will react. This approach creates a more palpable tension, resulting in a book that the Booker judges described as hypnotically tense and compelling.
The most defining feature of Szalay’s technique, particularly in Flesh, is its fundamental focus on exteriority. The novel is characterised as a novel of the body in motion, tracking the protagonist István almost entirely through his external, physical, and transactional existence. The novel meticulously documents changes in István’s external life: the various jobs he holds, the types of food he eats, the brands of cigarettes he smokes, and the different women he has sex with.
A crucial element of this technique is the concept of the Off-Screen Event. The novel consistently downplays, or handles off-screen, the internal, transitional, and psychological events that typically drive traditional character development. Readers only learn of István’s pivotal, life-altering experiences — such as his tour in Iraq with the Hungarian Army, his time in juvenile detention, or the birth of his child — in the aftermath, observing only their lasting external effects. The use of verby, staccato prose and the present tense serves as the ideal formal mechanism for propelling the reader through time, concentrating solely on the immediacy of István’s physical presence.
This stylistic commitment to exteriority, where the novel leverages the unsaid to speak volumes, reflects a deep literary commitment to portraying emotional absence. By presenting István as a deeply reticent man who struggles immensely to articulate his inner world, the minimalist style structurally embodies the character’s emotional repression. The reader becomes acutely aware of the many absences — the core psychological reality that the character cannot confront or articulate. This creates a critical tension: the narrative is event-driven and propulsive, yet the protagonist often feels remote and challenging to connect with. This emotional coldness is not a failure of characterisation, but an authentic portrayal of central forces in contemporary life: passivity, numbness, randomness, chance.
Flesh: Plot, Philosophy, and the Modern Male
Flesh recounts the life of István, following him chronologically from adolescence into middle age. The structure and plot are precisely engineered to explore major ontological concerns regarding fate and agency.
The narrative begins when István is a shy and awkward adolescent living with his mother in a Hungarian housing project, where he is unfamiliar with social rituals and feels isolated. His initial, defining experience is a complex, clandestine affair with an older, married neighbour. This affair rapidly spirals out of control, culminating in an act of tragedy and violence.
This incident sets his life onto a deterministic, inevitable path. He is subsequently led through borstal, followed by a stretch serving in the military in Iraq with the Hungarian Army. István then uproots his life, moving to London, where he experiences a vertiginous climb up the British class strata. His silence and physical utility make him highly effective as personal security for London’s super-rich, elevating him temporarily into the European top one per cent of income earners. This ascent is driven by competing, often self-destructive, impulses for wealth, status, and intimacy. Inevitably, these impulses threaten to undo him, leading to an economic decline and a stoic, melancholy return to the Hungarian town where he grew up. This conclusion affirms Szalay’s favoured narrative shape, the circle, where István subtly finds in his end, his beginning.
The novel’s narrative ambition is grandly philosophical. Sharing a literary lineage with Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh, Szalay set out explicitly to write about the Big Question. He sought to explore what it means to amble through time in a machine made of meat and the numbing strangeness of being alive. Szalay stated his apparent intention was to write about life as a physical experience, focusing intensely on the nature of being a living body in the world.
Central to the novel’s critique is the dichotomy between István’s expansive global movement and his static, isolated internal state — he remains a psychologically isolated and taciturn man from teenager to middle age. This contrast suggests that geopolitical experience or external success cannot overcome profound, foundational, personal trauma, thereby demonstrating the inherent limits of modern socio-economic mobility.
István himself embodies a profound, unsettling lack of agency. He is emphatically not the agentive, questing hero typically found in novels, but rather a man who is continuously buffeted by forces beyond his control, accepting the vagaries of life as outside his locus of control. His life progression feels like an inevitability, marked by unresolved trauma that worms its way through every page, illustrating a deeply fatalistic view of individual destiny where lows are guaranteed to follow highs. Even his ascent to wealth is temporary and volatile, showing that global economic tides — the tides of money and power — can equally uplift and crash the individual, reinforcing the sense of external dominion over personal fate.
Thematic Critique: Masculinity, Trauma, and Transactional Eros
Flesh conducts a severe and unflinching analysis of contemporary masculinity, placing economic migration, trauma, and the body at the forefront of its concerns.
The novel has been lauded as an essential, if uncomfortable, piece of contemporary literature, offering an unusually, confrontationally honest protagonist. It provides a refreshing, illuminating and true reckoning with the potentially destructive aspects of male character.
István is drawn as a stereotypically masculine figure: impulsive, physical, and profoundly emotionally remote. His defining characteristic is his internal repression — his inability… to understand himself was frustrating, demonstrating his struggle to cope with or comprehend incredibly challenging inner emotions and feelings. A persistent element of István’s characterisation is the contained threat of violence. This potential for force is established early by the violence that concludes his initial affair and is continuously reinforced by his subsequent careers in private security and the military in Iraq. This physicality positions him as a silent, physical presence defined by latent or overt force, underscoring the destructive potential that Szalay aims to illuminate.
Szalay foregrounds sexuality as a primary motivating factor in Flesh, utilising precise descriptions of sex that go beyond his previous works. He argues that sexual experiences are often decisive in terms of the course that our lives take.
The critical reception of the sexual content was polarised. Some reviewers found the sex scenes overly masculine and excessive, and characterised them as transactional and with no connection. This portrayal aligns perfectly with István’s essential emotional vacuum. The analysis suggests that, for István, sex functions as a release and is easy and satisfying. In sharp contrast, Love is a complication to sex. This reinforces the novel’s focus on exteriority and István’s relentless pursuit of physical satisfaction without the accompanying complexity of intimacy, which his deeply repressed emotional state simply cannot handle.
The novel’s structural power derives directly from its comprehensive charting of unresolved trauma and its aftermath. The early violence and his subsequent experiences in borstal and war create a profound emotional cost that István never processes. The result is an existence where trauma worms its way through every page.
The novel’s core tension resides in the continuous contrast between István’s physical and economic status in the present (a life of luxury, travel, and movement) and the unyielding, corrosive influence of the past. István’s inability to articulate or access these core feelings — stylistically embodied by the book’s stark, minimalist approach — ensures that the trauma remains perpetually indelible yet imperceptible to the character himself.
Geography, Class Mobility, and European Fracture
Flesh operates as a powerful commentary on contemporary Europe and the precarity inherent in the globalised economy. István’s journey across the continent, particularly his move from Hungary to London, exemplifies the challenges faced by protagonists caught between nations, often grappling with profound isolation and loneliness. His journey highlights the struggles of immigrant life.
The novel places the class divide in sharp relief by tracing István’s ascent from the Hungarian housing project to the realm of the wealthy elite in London. His temporary success is based solely on his physical utility, a physical transaction enabled by the global market that values his capacity for protection and violence. The essential fatalism of the narrative is demonstrated by the fact that this socio-economic mobility is ultimately conditional and temporary, reinforcing the key theme that István is continually buffeted by forces beyond his control.
It is worth noting that while the novel focuses intensely on class and physicality, it makes almost no mention of race, treating István’s whiteness almost as a default. However, his status as a working-class individual and an immigrant is precisely what exposes him to the power hierarchies of the elite for whom he works, where he is routinely condescended to.
stván’s intrinsic unlikability — which stems from his unkind interior monologues and emotional remoteness. This was a defining feature of the novel, leading to a highly divisive critical response, with readers split between pity and dislike. This divergence indicates that Szalay successfully subverts the conventional literary requirement for reader empathy. By deliberately refusing to grant István emotional warmth or charm, the narrative compels the reader to confront, rather than merely sympathise with, the reality of modern male inarticulacy and isolation. The protagonist’s remoteness is thus an essential element of the novel’s structural honesty, affirming its purpose as an illuminating and true portrait of contemporary male psychology.
David Szalay’s Flesh represents a significant evolution in his technique, expertly combining the thematic universality of his previous fragmented works with the focused intensity of a single, chronological life story. The novel stands as a powerful and necessary intervention in contemporary literature, offering a profound critique of individual agency and fate within the vast, indifferent structures of the globalised European economy.
The novel holds critical value because it describes and reckons with the potentially destructive aspects of their character that many contemporary male writers choose to avoid. Through its commitment to exteriority and its austere prose, Flesh manages to create a moving work of art that uses formal restraint as a mechanism to reveal profound emotional truths about unarticulated pain and isolation.
The novel’s structural inevitability is confirmed by its cyclical conclusion, where István’s life returns to its point of origin. The cycle of ascent and descent, coupled with the persistence of his foundational trauma, underscores the novel’s fatalistic view of personal destiny. It suggests that individual struggles are less about achieving control and more about being continuously buffeted by external forces — whether those forces are geopolitical, economic, or erotic.
The highly divisive reception generated by Flesh — the fact that readers were totally sucked into it, without actually really enjoying it very much — confirms the potency and success of Szalay’s challenging aesthetic strategy. The novel’s deliberate refusal to provide interior access or emotional comfort to the reader is precisely what makes it profound and memorable, aligning perfectly with its core ambition to be a confrontationally honest exploration of the modern male psyche. This earned, extreme approach to both narrative and characterisation suggests a robust new direction for Szalay’s technique, confirming that his trajectory remains one that bears close watching in the coming years. For writers, the lesson is clear: authentic emotional depth can often be achieved not through an abundance of psychological explanation, but through stringent, cinematic restraint and a relentless focus on external, physical reality.
The Original Writers Group 