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Flesh opens with 15-year-old István being groomed and seduced by a neighbour in her forties, followed by a dramatic accident borne of frustration. And so the tenor of this book is set, events that happen *to* István as he moves from Hungary to London via the Balkans and war-torn Iraq, rather than life-plans conceived and instigated. A story whose cynosure is the bedroom and the sexual encounters, almost exclusively initiated by women, consistently described in somatic not emotional terms.

István is a physically potent but conversationally deficient protagonist (but perversely not one lacking in intelligence). The dialogue is uniformly stilted and staccato. When asked for an opinion, even about his own experiences, a variation on a phrase including ‘okay� is István’s stock response. (I confess the ubiquity of that word grated on me). I have read an interview with David Szalay in which he says “What’s not said is as important, in this story and in the novel as a whole, as what is�. The art of being heard through omission is one that Claire Keegan has perfected, but unlike Keegan’s stories, in Flesh I found the omissions to be curious detractors not suggestive embellishments to the text.

At the core there is an incipient rags to riches fable of an immigrant overcoming the challenges of new surroundings and being taken advantage of, to make good. But the detached perspective and journaling approach chosen to convey the narrative, smothered my interest in the protagonist in a blanket of indifference. Instead of being immersed in his struggles and fate, I felt almost voyeuristic on occasion.

It appears that Szalay deliberately wrote a story about the most passive of characters and elected to focus on the effect of how a self-interested world treats him primarily from a corporeal standpoint. But it left me wanting less apathy, more resistance and emotional engagement, frankly more oomph! And so for me, ironically, Flesh was simply ‘okay�.

I have seen other reviews expressing more upbeat reactions to Szalay’s storytelling, so don’t let me put you off this book. It could be that Flesh merely happened to me at the wrong time.