István, the protagonist of David Szalay’s latest novel, Flesh, is born and raised in Hungary during the period of its transition towards European Union membership, but moves to England after serving five years as a soldier in Iraq. Hungary is only getting its very first McDonalds when István is growing up. His T-shirt bearing the image from Nirvana’s album cover, Nevermind, featuring the baby floating in a pool and reaching for a dollar bill, seems aspirational, but it is already fading when he is a teenager. István feels like a boy with potential, but an early sexual encounter with a much older woman and a subsequent act of violence sees him spend his early manhood in prison. He never seems to recover, if, indeed, he wasn’t already predisposed to becoming the man he becomes. The novel is oddly both intimate and reserved. We have a window into István’s life, but only at key episodes, and only through a third person narrative that offers no inner monologue, only the actions and words of a man trying to exist in a world he seems unsuited to inhabit; in relationships within which he seems to have little agency.

The narrative style is spare, and an initial reading may leave some cold to it. The chapters are episodic. The dialogue is sparse, reminiscent of a Harold Pinter play. The story is bleak. It’s a rags to riches journey, but it is also the story of the fall that follows. Success and wealth are illusory. Human connection is tenuous and possibly transactional. As a soldier in the Iraq war, István has proven to be an effective operator. But in the ordinary world he is indecisive and his humble beginnings have left him a dependant personality. He falls into one situation after another, rarely as a result of his own volition, most commonly as a response to the women who are drawn to him and seduce him. From the age of fifteen when he is first seduced by a much older neighbour, to later in life when he has lived with wealth and success, István’s course is largely determined by the women around him. When his mother effectively gets him a job after returning from the war, he knows it is the kind of job that should be temporary, yet he cannot motivate himself to make a change. Later, having spent years in employment that has nothing more to offer, he chooses to stagnate in his position when offered promotion. We wonder at his passivity, but we also see that from an early age, this is the kind of life he has been raised to. His five years in the army may have outwardly conferred a hero status upon him, but we also wonder if there isn’t something broken in István: that some part of him has been left in Iraq where he witnessed the death of a friend; or that who he is, is unsuited to the modern world. István is that most difficult thing, it seems: a teenager locked within a man’s body, incapable of expressing his feelings and uncertain about taking action. Yet, the novel does speak to the experience of being a man, which is coupled with feelings of disempowerment. It speaks to something fundamental about purpose and meaning in the modern world. It suggests an unexpressed despair.

Szalay’s skill lies in the way he constructs his narrative, making it say far more than he writes. Each chapter recounts a period of István’s life, and we find as we progress that crucial moments and periods of his life have occurred during the periods between chapters. István has spent time in prison as well as five years in Iraq between the first and second chapters, yet we are only given brief insights into what has happened during that period. In another narrative gap, typical of the book, there has been a seven-year gap between the death of his lover’s husband and a following chapter. In this time István has been married and has a son to the relationship. From the broadest narrative movements to the most intimate, István is characterised in deft and subtle strokes, with a laconic economy of language that typifies his character. In one scene where István breaks down and cries while in a crowd, we are only first made aware of his emotional trauma by the reactions of those around him: by the way they look and ask if he is okay. It’s the same story with the post-traumatic stress he carries from Iraq. There is no inner monologue to clue the reader to this, only a sudden and seemingly senseless punch that leaves his hand broken, requiring hours in hospital.

István’s trauma and his inability to direct his own life might seem to be overcome in the middle part of the novel when he becomes a property developer in London and enjoys the trappings of wealth and success. But his success is illusory. It is funded by the inheritance of his step son who despises him, over which his wife, Helen, is trustee until Thomas turns twenty-five. When Thomas turns twenty-five, the money spigot will be turned off, and István and his wife will be left with nothing. István’s days of opportunity are numbered. Even so, it takes his mother to point out the ominous reality: “You need to do something”; that István’s financial success is threatened “unless he [Thomas] dies.”

For me, this is where Szalay’s novel is most effective. Tension is first created around István’s undoubted ability to act – he has been a soldier – and his quiet passivity. Szalay now amplifies that tension as we wonder how István will respond to his mother’s implicit suggestion. István becomes more than a man who is drifting in life. Through Szalay’s use of structure and archetype, Szalay uses István to do what good Realist writing can: to signify a broader truth or insight through a particular circumstance. For instance, references to Hamlet help illuminate what otherwise may have been missed in the minutiae of the story. Thomas, István’s stepson, is studying Hamlet in school. Tellingly, he is not playing the role of Hamlet, which would be the obvious parallel, but Horatio. Alongside Thomas, István bears a complicated relationship to the play’s roles. The comparison isn’t exact. István is Hungarian, not Danish. And while he is another man who is too close to his mother, with a desire to act seething beneath a veneer of quietude, he is, at the same time, Claudius, a usurping stepfather intent on benefitting from the wealth of his predecessor, to the potential detriment of the son. Szalay’s spare portrayal of István is thereby subtly enlarged. István is a man caught in his moment, in the restraints of his upbringing, while simultaneously attempting to leverage the one advantage his passive journey through life has miraculously placed in his path: unbelievable wealth, even if it is not his own. István’s marriage to Helen confers status and wealth which is the promise of that dollar bill floated before the Nevermind baby, well within his orbit but tantalisingly out of his reach. In this context, he is constrained by capitalism, itself. War and action are the provinces of masculinity, but István must transact with a capitalist system that, while patriarchal in its very tenets, operates through laws and practices, rather than the raw energy of masculinity which it subsumes. Capitalist success has been a tantalising prospect all István’s life. Now, his only pathway to that success seems to lie with masculine action which is a greater danger than his passivity.

David Szalay has said that he intended his novel,

to some extent, [to be] a novel about contemporary Europe, and about the cultural and economic divides that characterise it. I also wanted to write about life as a physical experience, about what it’s like to be a living body in the world . . .

Understanding the novel from this perspective shows that the title signifies more than just the physical encounters István has with women, but also the experience of being a man, or more specifically, the experience of masculinity in a world that is designed to necessarily circumvent masculine urges and raw masculine power. The vagaries of István’s life, along a spectrum of success and failure, are according to a relationship between masculine action and social injunction.

In an early scene in the novel, while István is still at school, his teacher delivers a lesson on evolutionary fitness. The teacher explains that evolutionary fitness is defined as having offspring survive into adulthood. On this score, you can read the book to decide unambiguously if István achieves evolutionarily fitness. On a physiological level, István is strong and fit (in the common understanding of the word), and so therefore biologically suited to achieving ‘fitness’. But whether István’s masculine traits make him a potentially biologically ‘fit’ specimen within the modern world is a question that is open for readers to debate. It is possible to read this book as a meditation on the place of men and masculinity within modern capitalist culture, or a spare psychological portrait of an individual who has been repressed and abused, if you wish. That is the power of Szalay’s narrative. Flesh is not an uplifting book, nor is its prose outwardly satisfying for those who appreciate elegant style, but it is a book of subtlety which encourages engagement, because the surface of the story is not enough to explain István’s character or what happens. Some readers will dislike this book while others will become immersed in the story, as meandering as it is, or the protagonist, who will encourage many more interpretations.