The rumours are that white male writers are becoming extinct, but the reality is that rumours of their extinction have been greatly exaggerated. Take David Szalay. White and male and privately educated and Oxbridge and, phew, a Booker Prize winner! The full Monty. It’s like punk and Miranda July never happened. And, if that wasn’t exasperating enough, I then had to fight my way through realms of ecstatic pull quotes to get to the first page, i.e. I had to love this book or else I’d be persona non grata amongst the literary great and good. And did I love it? Well, in the end, mmm, I think I did. Flesh is a series of, more or less, compelling strung-together chunks of life which are, apparently, like the way “we live now”. Matter of fact, underplayed, black and white chunks which, nevertheless, pulled me along, although I felt like resisting partly because the main character, Istvan, is an inarticulate, emotionless everyman who the reader has to try to fill in the blanks of, and partly because the flat and economic prose style doesn’t excite, but then it kind of does. The novel’s loose grip suddenly tightening and from not caring what happens to Istvan you suddenly care very much indeed. David Szalay does this by accumulating more and more detail that starts adding up to a picture of a man’s life that from nowhere engages and starts to makes sense. In a way it’s a brilliant literary magic trick, whose workings I wasn’t aware of and certainly couldn’t spot. Let’s put it this way, two of the greatest Booker winners in recent years were Anna Burns’ Milkman and Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, maybe now you can add Flesh to that select duo.

Flesh – David Szalay – publ. Vintage £9.99

Steven Long