![\"David](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/2cca5737-c0f7-462c-b796-cf790b67775a.jpg\")
Critics do not accuse David Szalay of plagiarism but are puzzled by his evasiveness about Barry LyndonDAVID LEVENSON\/GETTY IMAGES<\/p>\nWhen David Szalay won the Booker prize last year for\u00a0Flesh, he was praised by the judges for its originality. <\/p>\n
The novel, which is now set to be turned into a film by the makers of Conclave, was hailed by the judging chair, Roddy Doyle, who said the judges had \u201cnever read anything quite like it\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Yet some readers have found it strangely familiar. Critics spotted striking similarities between\u00a0Flesh\u00a0and\u00a0Barry Lyndon, Stanley Kubrick\u2019s 1975 adaptation of a novel by William Makepeace Thackeray. Some are flummoxed that Szalay, 50, has not acknowledged the extent of the parallels more fully, while others believe he is playing a game with readers, sending them on a literary treasure hunt to uncover all the echoes, from lines of dialogue to the arc of the main character\u2019s rise and fall.<\/p>\n
Critics do not accuse David Szalay of plagiarism but are puzzled by his evasiveness about Barry LyndonDAVID LEVENSON\/GETTY IMAGES<\/p>\n
Flesh\u00a0is a rags-to-riches story that starts when the protagonist, Istvan, is a 15-year-old living on a Hungarian housing estate and ends when he is in late middle age, while Barry Lyndon is an Irish rogue. Both Istvan and Lyndon rise from criminal, impoverished beginnings, become soldiers, marry wealthy women, lose their sons, fight with mistrusting stepsons whose lives they ultimately spare, fall into financial ruin and eventually return to where they started. Although the details differ the similarities are so marked that the first critic to note them,\u00a0the writer Aled Maclean-Jones, described Flesh as \u201calmost\u201d a retelling of the film.<\/p>\n
Yet despite this, during a forthcoming interview for BBC Radio 4\u2019s This Cultural Life, Szalay downplays the connection.<\/p>\n
In the episode, which airs on Thursday, the host John Wilson asks whether the film is a \u201cdirect reference\u201d, to which Szalay replies: \u201cNo, I wouldn\u2019t go that far.\u201d Szalay says that Kubrick \u201cwasn\u2019t really at the front of my mind, I don\u2019t think\u201d.<\/p>\n
Pressed on whether the parallels might be subconscious, Szalay concedes that the film made \u201cquite a strong impression\u201d on him and that the overall arc \u201cmaybe was influenced by it in some way\u201d \u2014 but he rejects the idea that it was a homage.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Yet in the novel there is at least one line that suggests otherwise. In\u00a0Flesh, Istvan\u2019s future wife, Helen, takes him to the National Gallery to try to broaden his cultural horizons. Reacting to a painting by Titian, the inarticulate Istvan says: \u201cI like the use of the colour blue in that one.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
The title character in Kubrick\u2019s Barry Lyndon, played by Ryan O\u2019Neal, has become rich through marriage. He is being shown paintings when he says of another work, The Adoration of the Magi by the Florentine artist Lodovico Cardi: \u201cI love the use of the colour blue by the artist.\u201d <\/p>\n
In both the book and the film, there is also a scene in which his mother warns the protagonist about the precarity of his newfound wealth, and one in which his stepson denounces him in public, a catalyst for his eventual fall from favour.<\/p>\n
As Kubrick, who wrote the script, died in 1999, Barry Lyndon will still be in copyright although Thackeray\u2019s novel, The Luck of Barry Lyndon, is not.<\/p>\n
When asked about his inspirations for the book, Szalay has\u00a0offered different answers at different times.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The singer Dua Lipa interviewed him for her book club podcast last autumn and, when he listed influences on\u00a0Flesh, he cited Jacob\u2019s Room by Virginia Woolf and Lord Jim by Conrad, but not Barry Lyndon. A month later he told The Observer that its rags-to-riches arc \u201cwas an influence\u201d, while in an earlier interview with an academic journal, English Studies, he acknowledged the link with Thackeray\u2019s novel more fully.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201c[It] was an influence on elements of the plot, absolutely,\u201d he said. \u201cSometimes these echoes initially creep in unconsciously, then you notice they\u2019re there, and you like them and emphasise them further. That\u2019s what happened with allusions to picaresque narratives in\u00a0Flesh.\u201d<\/p>\n
David Sexton, the critic and former literary editor of the Evening Standard, said Szalay had done nothing wrong in drawing on another work but found his evasiveness puzzling.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t understand why, at this stage, he will not own up to it more,\u201d Sexton said. \u201cI \u2014 and everybody else who has noticed it \u2014 haven\u2019t found anything wrong in it. It is not plagiarism, it is completely legitimate to adapt something, and I have always admired his writing, but he has been uncommunicative about it all and misled people [when questioned]. He can\u2019t deny this: it is so close repeatedly.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Sexton also questioned whether Szalay, whom he regards as more naturally a short-story writer, felt unable to sustain a full-length narrative. Szalay abandoned another novel shortly before starting\u00a0Flesh. When he was Booker<\/a>-shortlisted in 2016 for All That Man Is, detractors argued it should have been ineligible because it was a linked collection of stories rather than a unified novel.<\/p>\n Another critic, Anthony Cummins, sees the references to Barry Lyndon as more akin to \u201cEaster eggs\u201d in films, hidden messages for fans to spot.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cSzalay is a brilliant writer, and I think he more artful than people are willing to credit,\u201d Cummins said. \u201cI think he\u2019s playing a game with people who know this film well, and he\u2019s left a lot on the table for them to enjoy, the way he\u2019s paralleled the plot and reworked different bits. It\u2019s a bit of fun, so maybe he feels, \u2018Why spoil it by talking people through the book in that way?\u2019 There\u2019s fun for the reader in sleuthing \u2014 it\u2019s quite an energising feeling to feel you\u2019re in with an author on a game. If he talked about that openly, he would close the door on that possibility.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Szalay had told Cummins, in a February 2025 interview, that the pleasure of writing for him lay in \u201cmaster[ing] the way a book manipulates the reader\u201d and \u201cthe game that\u2019s going on all the time between writer and reader in every context\u201d.<\/p>\n Flesh, Szalay\u2019s sixth book, is set to be adapted for film by\u00a0House Productions, the team behind Conclave<\/a>, Sherwood<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Brexit: The Uncivil War<\/a>.<\/p>\n Szalay, whose father is Hungarian, was born in Canada but grew up in Beirut and London. He was the first Hungarian-British author to win the Booker prize. Winners receive \u00a350,000 and usually see a big boost in sales.<\/p>\n This Cultural Life is on BBC Radio 4 at 11am on Thursday<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When David Szalay won the Booker prize last year for\u00a0Flesh, he was praised by the judges for its…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":526085,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[96,59,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-526084","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-gb","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/526084","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=526084"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/526084\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/526085"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=526084"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=526084"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=526084"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}