Summary of this article
The novel follows István, a working-class East European immigrant who briefly enters London’s business-media elite before being pushed out
It examines how physical presence and social hierarchy intersect in shaping power and control
Szalay frames masculinity as tied to agency, vulnerability, and adaptation within systems that resist outsiders
Many years ago, when I used to drive down Ring Road to work, I often noticed her. In a frayed yellow ghagra and short red blouse, making a provocative display of her fleshy midriff, she stood just above a stretch of thick long grass and wild shrubs—her face an interplay of disdain and defiance. She kept looking towards the Sarai Kale Khan bus terminus across the road. The smudged cheap lipstick could not hide the flaring bruise in the corner of her mouth that she nursed unconsciously.
Two men crossed the road from the bus-terminus side—businesslike, in a bit of a hurry. They walked up to her, and the pantomime show from my car window suggested some bargaining was going on. A deal struck, she slid into the long grass, one man in tow. The other amusedly looked on—his smile seemed to be saying, “What all happens in a city, huh!”
The light turned green and I drove towards South Extension. The image playing in my rearview mirror was of a dressed goat carcass hung upside down from a skewer.
This was from a time when the pandemic was still a couple years away. By now, that thick curtain of long grass, along with the drab, the chaotic traffic intersection, all is gone. A brand-new flyover has made the ride smoother. In fact, Sarai Kale Khan has given way to Birsa Munda Chowk, acknowledging the new political priority. The neon glow from inside the multilevel terminus gives you a momentary illusion of being at an interstate bus hub in the US.
The yellow-ghagra-red-blouse woman recently came back while I was reading David Szalay’s Flesh. Winner of the 2025 Booker Prize, the novel disarmingly talks about sex as a way of life, sex as a survival kit, stripped of inhibition and middle-class taboo. The woman was not even a streetwalker with exaggerated hip movement or slow pacing. She performed at the rudimentary level, to earn a living with her base capital.
István, the novel’s young protagonist, validates the idea that a clumsy probationer has the promise of a masterclass. Snubbed as a schoolboy for his inadequacies by the girl he has visited to go to bed with, he goes on to be tantalisingly close to building his own little empire in London—his brute masculinity his only asset. Unlike many other writers, Szalay writes about sex matter-of-factly without bothering about the atmospherics, not telling the reader if the air is moist or dry, if it’s a sensual summer breeze or biting winter chill blowing outside. To me, Szalay’s most subversive achievement in Flesh is the startling inversion of the seductress trope in culture. István rides through London’s rarefied elite landscape weaponising his phallus much the same way the ghagra-and-red-blouse woman conducted her bare business behind long grass under an open sky.
But there are moments when the erotic is sublimated by plaintive tunes of honest love and a wrenching sense of loss. Watching furtively his stepson, actually his challenger, jabbing himself with a needle, he calls the emergency number 999. But for this intervention, the massive business empire of his wife’s late husband would have been his.
The most poignant moment that moistens the reader comes towards the end of the book. Watching his dead wife’s nudes on screen alone at night, István masturbates and cries. To me, this is one of the most moving freeze-frames of recent British fiction.
Bhaskar Roy whose latest novel Border Crossers (Hachette, 2024) was shortlisted for the Valley of Words Award in conversation with David Szalay:
Sex has often been a crucial tool in corporate or political power play. In espionage, the world of gurus and godmen, it has been an effective agency. But almost always, it’s the femme fatale, a Mata Hari in a dangerous liaison. In Flesh, surprisingly, you’re on the opposite end of it, employing raw male sex prowess to upset the fine arrangement of a genteel milieu. Was it a conscious decision on your part to test the lustre of male libido?
I’m not sure exactly what you mean by “test the lustre of male libido” but I was certainly aware that the story in Flesh inverts some traditional story situations in the way you suggest. My aim wasn’t so much to make a gendered point, however, as to suggest broader human traits that everyone, male or female, tends to share. Beyond that, I suppose, in a novel somewhat focused on physicality it seemed appropriate that it was István’s physical being that was often the driver of the story—the physicality and sexuality of other characters is involved too of course.
The protagonist István—an underprivileged, East European immigrant in London—challenges the staid, ‘two inches of ivory’ world of the English elite. The irony is inescapable.
The novel does involve and depict a certain kind of English elite. But I would say this is not the traditional aristocratic elite that many people outside of England still seem to regard as the dominant elite of the country. This is a business and media elite, and a political elite that is tied to that. It is this society that István finds himself in, and in which he thrives for a while. Ultimately, he is rejected, but there is a question about whether that is something that he brings about himself, through foolish actions, or something that would have happened anyway. But yes, he is an outsider, an immigrant, economically underprivileged. The novel is also about a broader dynamic at play in contemporary Europe involving the eastern and western halves of the continent—it’s a power dynamic that interestingly echoes the power dynamics between the characters themselves.
The subtext of your novel, that a rank outsider attempts to subvert the perfectly insulated borough of the social elite not with a political ideology or the latest technology, but armed with a primeval sexual prowess, would perhaps make sociologists think a lot.
Power in sexual situations and power in social situations are at the very least analogous. I think the book makes this point quite strongly. In the first chapter the power imbalance is sexual, and to do with age and sexual experience. Later, there is an eerily similar situation where the imbalance is social and financial. István in his person sort of confuses these two things, they get tangled up and mixed together. (For instance, is the origin of Thomas’ hostility to him social or sexual or both?) This is interesting for me because, as I say, I see the two things as being intertwined anyway—I certainly don’t see them as being entirely separate. If these are the sort of thoughts that you suggest the book might provoke in sociologists then I can only hope that that is indeed the case!
In the Mahabharata, a young hero successfully penetrates a complex defence formation but dies since he hasn’t learnt how to come out of it. István too ingresses the subtle circle of the social upper crust, unleashing his robust masculinity, but gets webbed up in the concertina of the system. Instead of being entrenched in the world he thinks he has captured, the outlier gets rudely chucked out into the shards of reality.
Although he succeeds for a while István finally does not know how to navigate the world he enters. His physicality, which is what got him into that world in the first place, is also to some extent what causes him to crash out of it. But there’s more to it than that. He has agency. He makes decisions. Those decisions have consequences. There just doesn’t seem to be much connection between the morality of the decision and its practical outcome. I think there’s a sense, though, in which István finally transcends his own physicality, at least to some extent, and that perhaps is the meaning of all this.
One message from Flesh is that turmoil and incursions are temporary but the stasis of the system is permanent?
I believe that human nature is a permanent and unchanging factor in our existence and that all societies are expressions of that nature. So yes, I would agree with the question to that extent. But I do think that it is important for works of art to address that in very specific forms of their own culture—while there are “eternal truths” it is only possible to express them through the specifics of a particular time and place, or at least it’s only possible to express them in ways that are imaginatively and emotionally compelling like that. Very great works can “travel across time”—The Odyssey or Romeo and Juliet—but I have no doubt that those two works were more emotionally and imaginatively impactful for their original audiences than they are for us today. Every era needs to create its own “classics”—we only feel truth profoundly if it meets us in our own clothes.
Every significant work contains autobiographical elements. Are you hiding somewhere in Flesh?
I am hiding in Flesh but very very deeply. On the face of it István’s life could hardly be more different from mine, and István is obviously in many ways very different from me. (It’s hard to imagine him writing a novel.) But I suppose there are two particular areas of overlap. One is so general as to be almost meaningless—István and I are both human bodies, and in particular male bodies, being acted on by time and the rest of the universe. General as it is, that was something that I wanted to write a book about, since it seems to me to be the most basic fact of our existence. The other thing is slightly more specific—both István and I have Hungarian and English aspects to our lives. That was something I wanted to write about too—what it is like to have your life divided between two (or more) countries. It’s an increasingly common phenomenon in the world. But even here, there are fundamental differences between István and myself—he is a native of Hungary who moved as an adult to England. I made the same move, but in the opposite direction. (And like István, my presence in the new country was not a permanent one, and I have now moved on again.)
This article appeared in Outlook’s May 1 issue, 'Dravida Banga Ltd' which looked at the states going into elections and the issues facing them including delimitation and special intensive revision.
