David Szalay totally deserves the Booker Prize. But I believe his story has a forgotten supply

I first encountered Flesh as an audiobook, driving via France this summer time, and was gripped. I used to be additionally confused. For I had simply re-watched Stanley Kubrick’s 1975 excellent film Barry Lyndon to jot down an anniversary piece and steadily, it dawned on me that the story was the identical. Updated, relocated, re-imagined, however the identical. All the key episodes within the story of Barry Lyndon (the movie, not Thackeray’s novel on which it’s primarily based) – the romantic entanglements, the soldiering, the development to nice fortune via marriage, the lack of his son, the honourable however deadly option to spare his stepson in that final duel, the function performed by his mom, his ruination – all are brilliantly recreated in Flesh. So Szalay has the entire plot, your complete arc, provided to him.