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The unnamed narrator of Black Bag, an out-of-work actor living in London, has finally landed himself a role, and it’s a doozy. Advertised on the “admirably candid” website strange-acting-jobs.org, the role demands that he sit silent and unmoving at the back of a university lecture theatre for one whole term, dressed in nothing but a black leather bag. He will be paid in cash. He cannot believe his luck. “This is my big chance to do absolutely nothing, as thoroughly as possible.”
Black Bag is the hilarious new novel from Luke Kennard, a poet whose second collection made him the youngest ever nominee for the Forward prize in 2007, and whose debut novel was the similarly surreal and equally enjoyable The Transition. Both works operate as Black Mirror-style satires of late-capitalist, technocratic societies, where discontented thirtysomethings find themselves embroiled in bizarre social experiments.
The experiment here is based on a real-life one conducted by Charles Goetzinger in 1967 at Oregon State University. Goetzinger had one of his students attend classes for a semester dressed in a big black bag with only their feet showing, finding that over time the other students’ attitudes changed from hostility to acceptance to, eventually, friendship. Given enough exposure, it seems, we can come to accept anything.
Kennard’s hero is an affable millennial underachiever in his late 30s, scraping by doing unbearably worthy social issue plays that no one watches and lucrative murder-mystery dinner theatre for drunken plutocrats (he finds the latter “slightly less degrading”). Tired of his subsistence-level existence and yearning for a part he can play with conviction, he jumps at the chance to be Black Bag. The particularities are explained by the wonderfully bland Dr Blend, the course convener who is running the experiment. “Bag is to be characterless,” he notes. “The occasional involuntary movement will be allowed.” Impressed by Blend and his claim that they are “testing life itself”, the narrator promises to give it his absolute all. “About half should be sufficient,” observes Dr Blend.
As the experiment gets under way, the narrator enlists the help of his childhood friend Claudio, a successful livestreamer who immediately sees the possibilities for monetisation (Bag Coin, anyone?). Apparently, Black Bag chimes with something in the zeitgeist. “I think it’s a statement about being a man,” offers Claudio. “A rejection of the current options.” Black Bag also piques the interest of Justine Pearce, a post-humanist professor who wishes to strike up a relationship in aid of her research on “the coming technocracy”. “This is exactly what I want. To be comprehensively desired, with a key factor missing. I am a person. You are an absence. Ultimately, I would like to fuck nothing.” Meanwhile, the narrator grows increasingly attached to his bag, wearing it in his spare time, while in the background there are sightings of other Black Bags and talk of a secret bag society.
This is all tremendous good fun, with razor-sharp jokes and absurd scenarios galore. It is a campus novel for our end times, packed with keen insights into the current state of art, masculinity and friendship. But where Black Bag really cuts to the quick is in its forlorn depiction of modern – particularly millennial, particularly creative – life: the grotty flat, the visits to the parents (touchingly and imaginatively done), the constant rejection, the waning hope. The narrator knows, really, that he is never going to make it as an actor: “what terrifies me, Claudio, is that, in my heart of hearts, I am nothing more than an English suburbanite”. A realisation more frightening than any AI apocalypse.
