I distinctly remember that crisp January morning in 2018 when I met Hungarian-British author David Szalay for the first time at Taj Bengal’s coffee shop. We sat sipping coffee and discussing his Booker Prize-shortlisted novel, All That Man Is, as an informal prelude to a more formal conversation we were scheduled to have at the Kolkata Literary Meet later in the day. At that point, Szalay’s writing was a new discovery for me. I had just read All That Man Is and found it compelling on multiple levels: its themes that probed evolving stages of masculinity played out against the backdrop of a rapidly changing, unifying Europe, its style that gained forcefulness precisely by virtue of its sparseness, and its uniquely hybrid form poised somewhere between short stories and the novel. We touched on all these aspects, after which I mentioned that I was most struck by a sense of quest underlying and uniting the entire work. This was something about which Szalay, too, seemed enthusiastic, motivating us to address it in greater detail during our subsequent on-stage conversation.

All That Man Is consists of a series of stories, each with a different male protagonist living in or travelling through some part of Europe, typically not his hometown. The progressing age of the protagonists through the successive stories, together with the fluid, pan-European background and a shared feeling of alienation as they move through it, give this novel a sense of unity. What unifies it further is the sustained motif of quest: despite the flux, despite the alienation, all the protagonists seem to be driven by a search for something absent from their present lives, a search that Szalay terms “an appetite” for something more. During our public conversation, he identified this primarily as a search for erotic fulfilment in the early stories, for wealth and/or professional success in the middle stories, and for something almost transcendental in the concluding story.

While critics have largely read All That Man Is as a starkly realist novel, I find the quest motif often interwoven with a craving for something beyond physical, material realities, even in those earlier stories wherein Szalay himself identified more physical or material objects of quest. The teenaged Simon’s dreams about his idealised schoolmate Karen Fielding, or the young Balázs’ desire for the purest form of love, or the academic Karel’s evocation of a seemingly magical Oxford imbues the narrative with a latent Romantic impulse that does not crumble completely under the onslaught of grimly realist plot developments. And the fact that it doesn’t becomes tellingly evident in the way it surfaces with narrative urgency in the final story, as Tony, the oldest protagonist, yearns to find some meaning beyond his concrete reality — “to feel part of something larger” — as he senses his life drawing to its end.

Szalay’s recent Booker Prize-winning novel, Flesh, has several overlaps with his previous Booker Prize-nominated work: a courageous exposé of masculinity with all its dangers and vulnerabilities, a layered depiction of contemporary Europe spanning both Hungary and London, a powerfully terse style, and a form which, while adhering more closely to the novel genre, still seems innovative in its significant narrative gaps and resultant episodic effect. However, more remarkable is the way in which the novels do not overlap — the lack of a quest in Flesh becomes, for me, a palpably present absence. Both the personal and professional lives of the Hungarian protagonist, István, are marked by less purpose and more chance, the latter taking on almost tragic proportions by the end. Szalay subtly yet surely reveals the complex intersectionality that engenders this difference. In much of Flesh, István’s masculine identity cannot function without intersecting with his working-class and immigrant identities. The very real, inescapable barriers related to disenfranchisement and displacement erected by this intersectionality quash the possibility of any conceivable, let alone realisable, quest. Szalay symbolically captures this sense of constraint and a concurrent desire to escape it through the image of István going running over heaps of brown leaves in London’s Battersea Park and recalling how he enjoyed doing the same as a child, because the dry leaves made noise but didn’t “impede you”.

The linearity of an evolving masculine quest, which propels the narrative in All That Man Is, clearly collapses in Flesh. What replaces that linearity, however, is something more complex, more grey, more poignant. The majority of critics have systematically highlighted the passivity and silence of István, as well as the darkness and alienation saturating Flesh. For instance, in her recent conversation with Szalay conducted at the New York Public Library, Dua Lipa emphasises the passivity of the protagonist and the “desperately lonely” quality of the book, Johanna Thomas-Corr in The Times calls Flesh “almost certainly the most monosyllabic Booker prizewinner ever”, and Gaby Wood, the chief executive of the Booker Foundation, refers to it as “heartbreaking”.

Yet, the novel partially undercuts these observations even as it validates them. Despite the absence of any singular quest, Szalay gives his protagonist moments of significant agency. István exercises agency by migrating from Hungary to London (although this occurs in the gaps between chapters); he summons up the courage to save a stranger, Mervyn, from a nocturnal mugging attempt on the streets of London when he could have easily walked away; he persuades the super wealthy Helen Nyman to use public transportation with him in Munich one day, presumably in an act of asserting his class identity; and putting aside insurmountable hostilities, he attempts a visit to Thomas’s hospital as his stepson comes back to life from the brink of drug-related death. Likewise, in the rare moments when István goes beyond speaking mere monosyllables, his words are charged with unmistakable urgency — he asks the elder married neighbour who uses him sexually as a minor whether or not she loves him; even more strikingly, he advises his son, Jacob, that escapism is not the solution to anything and that he must stand up to the bully at school. Stripping away the mask of taciturn masculinity, he sobs publicly when passing a used BMW on display for sale after returning to Hungary, thereby uttering that unsettling sound between silence and speech that “speaks” volumes more than most words could have done.

That the indisputable darkness of Flesh is not relentless is perhaps most evident in the final section of the narrative, in which we find István relocated to Hungary. The section immediately prior to this one does appear unrelentingly bleak, with the protagonist having lost everything, both personal and professional, and going down a spiral of drunkenness, concussion, and death wish. This section parallels the darkest story from All That Man Is, in which the iron oligarch, Aleksandr, devastated by absolute failure after reaching the culmination of his capitalist quest, succumbs to nihilism: “And ten years later he took his own life. He had nothing left to live for. He had devoted his whole life to something and it had failed.… That was it.”

By the final section of Flesh, however, István appears to have gone beyond that state of mind, to have survived the enormity of tragedy in his life. His return to his Hungarian hometown is certainly not an idealised homecoming, but neither is it a deathlike retreat. István still seeks the intimacy of physical love with his new partner, he still considers getting a puppy that might connect him more vitally to the memories of a beloved child, and he can still burst into tears as he walks by the BMW in the second-hand car market. In short, István still experiences both the pleasures and pains of life, physically and emotionally. Szalay’s crafting of István’s final phase, while deviating from the conclusion of Aleksandr’s story, is reminiscent of a quote from Henry James’s The Ambassadors that appears quite prominently in the opening story of All That Man Is: “Live all you can. It’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven’t had that, what have you had?… What one loses one loses. Make no mistake about that. Still we have the illusion of freedom…”

Although Dua Lipa, in underscoring the bleakness of Flesh, points to “alone” as the ultimate word of the novel, to me the penultimate word, “lives”, is equally resonant. The protagonist does not die or exist alone; instead, Szalay chooses to write that after István’s mother’s death, he “lives alone”. The placement of those last two words next to each other seems neither ironic nor accidental.

The plot of Flesh is indubitably darker than that of All That Man Is, but it is the more profound implication of its narrative that renders it an incredibly powerful novel. Szalay delineates with sophistication and subtlety that it is not in clear-cut categories of either/or, but in the hyphenated spaces and interstices between passivity and agency, silence and speech, horrors and joys, and flesh and spirit, that life happens. Flesh, after all, is never really just flesh.

Srilata Mukherjee is a former faculty member in the writing programs at Harvard University and Duke University. Having chosen to live in her hometown, Calcutta, after three decades in the West, she currently freelances as a literary-cultural critic and higher education consultant. She can be reached atsri.mukherjee@yahoo.com