This book, Flesh, is the sixth novel by the 51-year-old Hungarian/English author, David Szalay, who has previously been short-listed for the Booker Prize. It is initially set in Hungary and it ends up back there, in between times the main character, Istvan, enjoying/enduring a roller-coaster lifestyle in London when he gets a serious upgrade on his job as a strip-club bouncer after he helps a man, who transpires to be wealthy with connections, after a street attack in the West End.

There is quite a lot of flesh involved, as in sex, Istvan, losing his virginity as a teenager. All well and good, but his tutor is a 42-year-old friend of his mother’s who is “old and ugly”; her progression of rewards for him helping her with her shopping moving from sweets and ice cream to something rather more physical. Oh, and she’s married. Later he fails to woo his uncle’s stepdaughter on a frustrating adventure at Lake Balaton (which is shown on the home page) and he joins the army and fights in Iraq.

Throughout the book we learn that Istvan is given to introspection; conversation is not his strong suit. His response to questions is often monosyllabic and usually brief. Asked how it felt about seeing people dying in the war, he opts for “It was OK”. Asked by Helen, the wife of a boss who employs him in London, if he’d like her to “give you a blow-job”, he pauses for a moment before replying “OK.”

His relationship with Helen, and his uneasy relationship with her Oxford-educated son, Thomas, form the main essence of the book. The former unfolds and develops while she – in fact, they – are in Munich where her husband is having (ultimately unsuccessful) treatment for cancer. After his death, Istvan and Helen marry. They have a son, Jacob. But Thomas is always there, lurking, and the money Helen has from her late husband is held in trust for him until he’s 25. He considers Helen and Istvan have stolen what belongs to him, especially so as Istvan gets tied up in business deals, often in which he is out of his depth, with political ramifications.

At an evening function in connection with one of Istvan’s projects, the two men get involved in a physical confrontation. It was never going to be easy from there. Istvan has to endure tragedy before he does a genuinely good act, effectively saving Thomas’s life. When Istvan goes to see Thomas in hospital, he is told “he doesn’t want to see you”. Later, quite a lot later, back in Hungary, he tells his new woman, Bori, about his extraordinary time in London and shows her some photos. He reflects that talking about London is “like he’s talking about someone else’s life”.

Tangentially, I read a piece in the Financial Times recently which reminded me of this book in the regard that its chief protagonist is from Hungary, a country where there are concerns regarding civil liberties. This is even more so in Turkey. The piece in question was authored by a Turkish journalist called Elif Shafak. She wrote: “One of our running jokes goes like this: a journalist behind bars asks the prison guards if he might have some books to read and enquires about a particular novel. ‘No, we don’t have that novel,’ comes the reply. ‘But we do have the author’.” It seems some Turkish jokes are not really a laughing matter.