Autumn 2026 – maja -bagging rights

What does a man lose when he hides his face for a living? 

There are worse jobs than sitting silently in a bag, and the narrator of Black Bag has had most of them. He is a 37-year-old actor with no name, no money, and many opinions about himself. Dr. Blend, a tired psychologist near retirement, hires him to sit in lectures on attraction theory wearing a black bag and no shoes, while also making no sound whatsoever. He is paid to say nothing, do nothing. He is also, from first page to last, the most talkative character in the book. 

The premise of the novel is real. In 1967, an anonymous student sat through a term of Charles Goetzinger’s classes at Oregon State University covered head to ankle in black cloth. Goetzinger was testing Robert Zajonc’s mere-exposure effect (the finding that we grow fonder of whatever we see often) and, as Kennard notes in the novel’s acknowledgements section, saw the class change “from hostility toward the Black Bag to curiosity and finally friendship.” What drew Kennard to the experiment was not the class itself. He came across the study by accident, while researching something else, and as he says in an August interview for the Booker Prize, he “was more interested in the person playing black bag than the results of the study.”

The Booker judges call the novel an “of-the-moment satire” that “considers anonymity and disgust, online rackets, and what it means to find love in our unstable times.” Christopher Shrimpton, in the Guardian, found it “tremendous good fun,” and it is. The reviews praise the jokes, the absurdity, and satire of masculinity; only a few ask what the narrator actually has to lose. The narrator says his self “has come to feel arbitrary, which is not to say optional,” and that he would “just as soon be black bag than whatever my self is.” Yet some thirty chapters later he writes to Claudio, his friend since childhood and a video-game streamer, that the bag hasn’t replaced him: he is “still myself in here,” only “amplified.” The bag hides his face, but he is, in his own words, “more myself than ever.” 

As a story about losing yourself, Black Bag is both easy and hard to interpret. Easy, because in a literal sense the narrator disappears from the world: the students, who only ever see the black bag, and Justine, a post-humanism professor and his love interest, who has heard his voice, but doesn’t recognise him on the train without it. Hard, because we never actually see him silent or invisible. The book’s lack of quotation marks makes this even more difficult: it is often hard to tell if the narrator is internally monologuing or speaking. In the audition room, before the bag even exists, he describes “the usual plunging feeling, that every human being is real, substantial and well defined except for me.” The bag doesn’t take him apart so much as give him somewhere to hide, and it’s that hiding that gives him a wage, a following, and, in the end, applause.

An actor’s trade is being a blank page, becoming whatever the director asks, and the bag is the purest part he has been offered: a role with no lines. Emptiness, then, shouldn’t be anything new to him. Shrimpton, the Guardian’s reviewer, quotes the line that gives it away: “What terrifies me, Claudio, is that, in my heart of hearts, I am nothing more than an English suburbanite.” That isn’t the fear of having no self so much as the fear of having a dull one.

So, what does he want instead? When he can’t sleep, he imagines living in a rural Swedish town where he is a one-armed sawmill worker looked after by an old woman named Birgitta. She sits with a blanket on her knees while he makes tea, and whenever he’s upset, she is the one to comfort him. Philip Womack, in the Times Literary Supplement, reads these daydreams as a “nostalgic counterpoint to the insanity of the baffling twenty-first century.” I read them as the bag’s mirror image: where the bag is just a role, the daydream is the wish to finally be himself, to be looked at and looked after as he is. 

A self, then, is something other people look after. Birgitta comforts him and dies. In a daydream he imagines Justine as she scratches the back of the bag’s head and tells him: “Nobody gets how hard you’re working.” Johanna Thomas-Corr, in the Sunday Times, calls the novel “a thoughtful, tender meditation” on connecting with people “when you suspect you might not possess a fully formed self to offer them.” It is tender, but it is very much one-sided. The women of his imagination give the comfort and he takes it. The book never asks what they get back. The book mocks male self-pity, yet still lets its narrator keep all the comfort.

The one time he confesses to being Black Bag, he also confesses to being himself. Nobody hears it. He has taken the bag off as Justine is leaving the train carriage, unaware of his company. He presses himself to the window and says, to nobody and everybody at the same time, “I’m in here. It’s me.” In the bag, people look at him all day. Out of it, no one gives him a second glance. 

If the bag is the only thing that gets him seen, another bag is a threat. So, when the narrator sees someone else in a black bag in a supermarket, he cares. He chases it, as one would chase a thief, and when he corners it against a skip, he finds a male student inside, one who asks him: “Why does everyone hate me?” 

It is the narrator’s first meeting with another Black Bag, and it reads more like looking in the mirror than seeing someone else in a costume. It is as if he is hearing his own question, asked by someone else. The narrator’s reply is not comforting: “I am black bag. I created black bag and I am black bag. […] I am you. I’m not very comfortable with someone else running around being me. You could do anything.” He cares about the bag, not the boy; faced with someone going through what he claims to be going through, he sees only a rival for his role. The narrator never faces what he saw in the boy, and the book lets him get away with it, which I think is a mistake.  

Towards the end of the book, other men start wearing black bags as part of a movement. Claudio, the streamer friend who has been trying to cash in on the bag, is taken in by them and disappears for days. He then returns from the fictional Center for Advanced Studies in Masculinity in Copenhagen with a diagnosis of what is wrong with men: “Men are mostly frightened and crazy and very easily misled. They just want someone to be nice to them, but they don’t know how to ask for that.” 

Claudio also has a plan to make himself and the narrator rich. He turns up and says he did it all because he loves him. “I love you too, I guess,” the narrator replies. Womack calls the novel “an ode to the importance of friendship, tenderness and love,” and this is the scene that earns it. It is a lovely moment for the two friends, but it is also a business arrangement. It’s difficult to read the novel as a satire of male self-pity when it ends by rewarding it. 

The ending is the book’s last evasion. Throughout the novel, Kennard keeps raising the question whether his narrator is any good, and then declines to answer it — for instance, regarding the boy in the supermarket. The ending is no different. On the last day of class, after a whole term of growing used to him, the students stand and applaud the figure in the bag. “Is this not everything you ever wanted?” he asks. “Then why, I wonder, does it feel so—” 

And the sentence stops. One way to read this is that the students are applauding a bag, not him. Being loved by people who do not know you is only a different kind of absence. The unfinished question is his way of admitting it. A broken sentence is also a way of not answering, maybe even finally realising everything that has happened. All through the book we hear the narrator’s stream of consciousness, yet he rarely admits his actual feelings. The one time he says what he actually feels, on the train, nobody hears him, and when he comes close again in front of the class, the author cuts him off. He gets the applause and never gets to say whether it was enough. 

I enjoyed Black Bag more than I was convinced by it. It was hard to stop reading, and that’s Kennard’s doing: he gives the narrator a voice that is funny, vain, and always one step ahead of us. But the book is also the story of a man who wants to be seen as himself, while being unable to see anyone else, and he is never held accountable for it. The novel rewards him instead, with a friend, a somewhat happy ending, and a plan to get rich. 

So, what does a man lose when he hides his face for a living? The narrator answers that himself back on the train, to nobody: “I’m in here. It’s me.”

He does not lose himself. He loses everyone who might truly see him.

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