In 1967, an Oregon State University experiment tested psychologist Robert Zajonc’s ‘mere-exposure effect’, the theory that familiarity breeds affection. A student spent an entire academic term sitting silently at the back of a classroom inside a large black bag. Initial hostility reportedly gave way to curiosity and then acceptance. What nobody asked was what the experience felt like for the person inside the bag.
That neglected question becomes the starting point of Luke Kennard’s strange, funny and unexpectedly moving campus novel, Black Bag, shortlisted for Booker Prize 2026. Kennard transfers the experiment to a contemporary British university and places at its centre an unnamed 37-year-old actor whose career has drifted into the margins. Reduced to pantomimes, murder-mystery dinners and small productions, he clings to acting despite mounting frustration and the suspicion that his ambitions may never amount to much.
When an academic named Dr Paul Blend recruits him for a modern version of the experiment, he agrees. Encased in “a black leather suit bag, a reversible grey metal double zip all the way up the side”, he must sit silently in lectures without speaking, reacting or displaying any recognisable personality. Even shoes are forbidden because, as Blend explains, “shoes would communicate”.
The premise is delightfully absurd, and in Kennard’s hands it yields both comedy and insight. Students initially stare, speculate and joke about the silent figure at the back of the room. Eventually, Black Bag becomes an accepted presence. Once his existence no longer seems strange, people begin treating his silence as though it contains meaning.
For an actor who has spent years trying unsuccessfully to be noticed, anonymity offers an unexpected relief. When his childhood friend Claudio asks what Black Bag means to him, he replies: “I walk around and nobody can see who I really am.” The experience feels both liberating and lonely. “Everybody notices you,” he says, “but it’s not really you they are noticing.” Looking at his own uncovered reflection becomes disconcerting because the anonymous figure seems more authentic than the face beneath it. “In taking time out from Black Bag,” he admits, “I feel as though I’m cheating on myself.”
Underlying this transformation is anxiety about failure and artistic ambition. The narrator describes himself as “catering to an audience I despise and who, if they have any sense at all of the tragedy of human life, pity me.” Later, he confesses to Claudio: “What terrifies me, Claudio, is that, in my heart of hearts, I am nothing more than an English suburbanite.”
Human relationships take a strange turn when Black Bag becomes involved with Justine Pearce, a married professor of post-humanism who will only have an affair with him if he remains Black Bag. Their conversations are often as revealing as their encounters. When she tells him he seems afraid of “so much”, he replies: “I think that someone telling you that they know you’re in pain is the same as someone telling you that you’re special. I think it’s the same as love.”
As Black Bag, the narrator repeatedly escapes into fantasy. During lectures he invents an elaborate life in Sweden involving a woman named Birgitta, a sawmill and an imagined domestic future.
The tension between art and performance resurfaces when Justine and Black Bag attend a screening of The Orb of Homunculus, a film generated entirely by AI. The film is dreadful because it merely delivers what it assumes audiences want. “It’s what it thinks we want.” Kennard’s target is less technology than the impulse behind it: the habit of anticipating expectations and shaping oneself accordingly.
The contrast between Black Bag and Claudio reinforces this idea. Claudio has become wealthy as an online streamer, constantly managing a public persona. He immediately sees commercial potential in the mysterious figure and dreams up increasingly absurd schemes, including “Bag Coin”. Black Bag appears to reject branding altogether, yet both men are engaged in their own forms of self-invention.
Surreal, funny and heartbreaking, Black Bag begins as an absurdist comedy and gradually reveals itself as a novel about loneliness, ambition and the temptation of self-sublimation. What begins as an academic experiment ends as a portrait of a man who finds greater comfort in imagined lives than in confronting the disappointments of his own.