Black Bag

‘How does an aspiring actor survive in contemporary London, where monthly living costs can rise well over a thousand pounds? The obvious solution – be born rich – has eluded Black Bag’s protagonist, a 37-year-old man who cobbles together an artistically and financially unsatisfying life performing in productions that stretch and undermine the meaning of theatre. That is until he gets a job showing up to student psychology lectures dressed in a black bag. Luke Kennard’s of-the-moment satire considers anonymity and disgust, the online rackets of cryptocurrency and energy drinks, and what it means to find love in our unstable times. There’ll be a lot of discussion about what the novel has to say about the state of modern masculinity (fractious; confused) – we also admired its sharply crafted sentences, memorable sex scenes, and humour.’

Johanna Thomas-Corr, The Sunday Times 

‘The novel’s off-kilter humour combines minute social observation with incongruous ideas, drawing on a wide sphere of reference from religion to pornography. Conceptually, Black Bag is as surreal and ambitious as Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, only written by someone with the comic instincts of Peep Show’s Jesse Armstrong. 

‘But beneath the playfulness lies a thoughtful, tender meditation on the difficulty of being a man in the modern world: how to find purpose, how to make art that matters and how to connect with other people when you suspect you might not possess a fully formed self to offer them. In Kennard’s hands, the bag contains a lot, and he’s so generous with the jokes that I found myself laughing on almost every page. A brilliant comic tour de force.’

Philip Womack, Times Literary Supplement

‘Luke Kennard is also a widely admired poet, and his prose ripples with unusual images (Dr Blend is “a sleek epistemological puma”) and wry aphorisms (“Do not envy the successful. They probably have panic buttons in their houses”). The tone throughout is delightfully mordant and the novel is as much concerned with writing as anything else: Black Bag, when sitting in the lecture rooms, has long, novelistic daydreams about living in Sweden and working in a factory, which form a realistic, even nostalgic counterpoint to the insanity of the baffling twenty-first century. In the end, this is a very modern novel with a comfortingly familiar core: that of an ode to the importance of friendship, tenderness and love.’

Christopher Shrimpton, the Guardian

‘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.’

Chris Rutledge, Washington Independent Review of Books

‘Its social commentary aside, Black Bag’s biggest strength lies in the colorfulness of its cast. The narrator, the students, Professor Blend, and Claudio exist both as send-ups of stereotypes and as warnings about the precariousness of our times. (One scene involving some hapless young men could’ve come straight from Fight Club.) All in all, this is a fun novel that will make readers laugh, think, and possibly yearn for the safety of their own comforting sack.’