Somewhere around page nine of Luke Kennard’s third novel, Black Bag, a director asks our narrator, at an audition for a devised piece about climate collapse, to announce a flood.
He goes blank. Then he opens his mouth and sings one long note, alternating between his chest voice and his head voice, getting louder in inverse proportion to his confidence. And then, one by one, the entire audition panel joins in and sings the note with him. They hold it. They all stop at exactly the same moment.
Then the director says: and now, if you could announce the flood.
I put Black Bag by Luke Kennard down and laughed on public transport, which I hate doing.
What Luke Kennard Is Working With
Our narrator is thirty-seven, an actor, five foot six, and broke in a very specific and well-documented way: he needs one thousand four hundred pounds a month to keep a roof over his head, has not had paid work in three months, and considers a ruby grapefruit at fifty-five pence to be a treat.
So he answers an advert seeking a short, silent male actor for a psychological study. Discretion obligatory. Fee to be discussed.
A tired psychologist called Dr Blend measures him for a tailored leather sack with two holes cut in the hem for his calves, later makes him a pair of eyeholes with a stab of nail scissors, and pays cash for him to sit at the back of the lecture hall all term doing absolutely nothing.
Within a fortnight he is wearing it at weekends. On his own. For pleasure.
This premise of Black Bag by Luke Kennard is not invented, incidentally. The experiment happened at Oregon State in 1967 and the students really did move from hostility to curiosity to affection over the semester. Kennard read about it while writing a poem and could not stop thinking about the man inside.
The Reason to Read Luke Kennard
The voice. It is very hard to convey and I am going to fail, so here are three things it does.
It flatly declines, from beginning to end, to put his parents on the page. Rendering a real person in prose strikes him as an indecency, and these two above all others deserve to be spared it. So for the whole novel his mother and father appear only as two pillars of rough-hewn stone. He brushes moss off them. He hangs a garland on one. And he tops up the other’s eye well. What starts as an absurd running bit becomes, by the end, the most affecting thing Luke Kennard does here, and something like a moral position: put someone into words and you have shrunk them and handed them over.
It builds an entire imaginary Swedish village to hide inside when lectures get boring, complete with a sawmill job, a workplace injury, colleagues who bully him, and an old woman named Birgitta who feeds him cake and offers proverbs. Then, three-quarters of the way in, an imaginary stranger stops him in an imaginary street to break the news that she is gone, and no amount of wishing gets her back, not even for a woman he invented from nothing. That chapter wrecked me.
And it is genuinely, unusually alert to money. Not money as theme. Money as arithmetic. What things cost, what a cancelled gig takes from you, what you will agree to do for two hundred and fifty pounds an hour by a company that is very probably automating your entire profession out of existence.
What Luke Kennard Is Really Chasing
Shame. Or, in the phrase the narrator’s oldest friend comes up with while stoned, the great river of shame that runs underneath masculinity, into which men dip at the slightest provocation.
Everybody in this novel has built something to keep them out of that river. The friend, a video-game streamer with a million viewers, has an audience and a personality he is deliberately sanding down, episode by episode, so the business can scale. An American investor has an app in which a child writes two hundred words about their father every night and the father is shown an AI simulation of that child aged sixty-five, talking about him; he describes rooms of grown men sobbing. There is even a whole covert brotherhood of men in identical bags who assemble in a warehouse and chant a liturgy about how putting this right will take their grandsons’ lifetimes.
Our man just has the bag, which turns out to be the cheapest and most effective of all of these, because it does not sell you anything and does not ask you to compare yourself with anyone.
Where Luke Kennard Loses His Grip
Three things, and none of them fatal, but all three are places where Luke Kennard is coasting.
The crypto stuff is thin. Shares in the performance, a coin, some NFTs, an investor who talks in aphorisms. It is a soft target and the satire is broad in a novel that is elsewhere very precise.
The phone-sex sections go on. A professor recruits our narrator into what she calls an experimental relationship, conducted entirely through the bag, and periodically rings him to narrate, in exhaustive detail, encounters she has had with other men. One of them, staged before dawn in a Parisian cake shop, runs to the length of a short story. It is beautifully written and I still felt the air go out of the book each time another one started.
And the secret order arrives very late. Getting there involves dragging a rotting swan pedalo out of a boathouse and pedalling six miles up a canal, which is one of the great comic journeys, and then what he finds is a reasonably ordinary cult gag.
Content, briefly, because it is a lot: explicit sex throughout; repeated and specific suicidal ideation; serious drug use and one very bad trip; a near-drowning; alcohol misuse; and a subplot about the sextortion of teenagers, on which the Internet Watch Foundation is the place to go if the novel makes you want to know more.
If You Finish This and Need Something Else
Read The Transition, Luke Kennard’s first novel, which does a similar thing to a different scam. Then Notes on the Sonnets, the prose poems that won him the Forward Prize, if it was the sentences rather than the story you were here for. Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting is the obvious contemporary neighbour and, not coincidentally, Murray has blurbed this one. And go back to Lucky Jim, because the ancestry is unmistakable: a clever, thwarted man faking competence for a university that is politely destroying him.
The Verdict
Black Bag by Luke Kennard ends mid-sentence. I am going to spoil that much and no more, because it is the last joke and it is the argument.
The narrator has spent his entire adult life wanting to be seen, properly seen, applauded, told he was good, and the only role that ever fitted him was one in which nobody could see him at all. And at the precise moment the thing he always wanted finally arrives, the book cuts him off before he can tell you what it felt like.
I have gone back and forth on whether Luke Kennard is being cruel to him there or letting him off. I think it might be both, and I think that is the most honest available answer, and it is why I will be pressing this book on people all year.
