In the 1967 university lectures conducted by the social psychologist Charles Goetzinger, there was an unusual guest watching from the back row. For the academic term, the students at Oregon State were joined by an unnamed, unspeaking and unidentifiable person clad in a black fabric bag, the length and breadth of which encompassed their entire body. Only the pair of bare feet protruding from the bottom marked it out as human. Goetzinger’s experiment was designed to show how even something as viscerally unsettling as a silent, black-clad figure would, after time, come to be seen as a benign, even welcome presence.
Luke Kennard, one of the nominees for this year’s Booker Prize, takes this real-life episode and runs with it headlong into the morass of the 21st century. In his fictional London university, a professor recreates this experiment, employing a down-on-his-luck actor to take the role of a lifetime: “black bag”.
Through this conceit, Kennard explores the absurdities of being alive in the age of the internet. First the actor begins to enjoy the performative anonymity offered by black bag (the title never capitalised; this is not a proper noun – anyone can be black bag). But then other people start getting in on the act. His video-game streamer friend mints NFTs for his fans. Other black bags are sighted. There are rumours of clandestine meetings.
Aside from his exceptional grasp of the weight and heft of a sentence, his obvious delight in putting one word deftly before the next, Kennard’s skill lies in how seamlessly he holds a mirror to society through his absurd premise. How alienated people – especially young men – crave some collective sense of acceptance; how we all want to be seen but not necessarily how we really are; how even something as stupid as a man wearing a black bag will inevitably be exploited for financial gain.
We are all black bag, in a way, Kennard argues – presenting to the world a version of ourselves that exists somewhere between the ‘real’ us and some unknowable construct. We all crash through life, unseen and unseeing, yet undeniably ‘there’, buffeted along by forces beyond our control or understanding. It’s a hell of a read.