A Man in a Bag: Six Novels and What They Cover

Essay - Critical Analysis

A broke actor takes paid work sitting silently in a black leather bag during a university psychology course. Nobody sees his face. The students notice him at last. Fifteen years of failed acting earned him less attention than this. He is the narrator of Luke Kennard’s Black Bag, one of six novels on the Booker shortlist announced on 22 September. The winner is named on 9 November 2026.

The prize is a toss-up between three of them. Douglas Stuart’s John of John looks like the safe choice. Rebecca Perry’s May We Feed the King and M. John Harrison’s The End of Everything are the underdogs, and either would deserve it. The other three each find a strong device early and lean on it until it thins. Kennard’s bag is the clearest case.

Kennard tells his story in brief chapters. His narrator turns each humiliation into theory or anecdote before it can sting. He wants to disappear from scrutiny and stay visible to everyone. For a while that joke carries the book, and his parents soften it. He will not describe them, afraid that characterising them would turn them into material. So they appear as rough-hewn stone pillars. He brushes moss from one. He tops up the other’s eye well. Then the satire widens to investment and crypto. Each new strand sets the bag to work again, and the image at the centre thins.

Elizabeth Strout’s The Things We Never Say has the same problem, more quietly. Artie Dam, a history teacher of fifty-seven, has spent two months planning how to die. The novel begins there. His students call him Damn-dam, the teacher who jokes and notices when one of them is frightened. Nobody knows the man counting out methods. Artie earns the attention. A memory of his sister Maria, white sugar around her mouth after eating in secret in the cellar, is left alone to do its work. Strout works by delay. An ordinary moment settles, and a disclosure much later changes what it meant. That needs room, and the middle crowds it. One trouble follows another, each before the last has altered anything. The narrator starts explaining too, stepping in to say how little people see of one another. Maria in the cellar needed no gloss.

Marlon James has the opposite problem. Strout runs short of room. James takes too much. In a rehearsal house on Lady Musgrave Road, Kingston, in 1988, a company of gay men is staging John Herbert’s prison play Fortune and Men’s Eyes. Men with clubs break through the door. The Disappearers tracks the aftermath through changing forms. Eddy Porteous, cast as Mona, writes a diary that records fear before he can sort it into meaning. An interview catches injury as it starts turning into procedure. The director’s letters carry exile and failed love. One stretch moves into the second person. Together they build an argument about how a country loses gay men by daily habit as much as by violence. Then James stays too long with the performance of punishment. He trusts volume where restraint would do more, and the book starts repeating what it has proved.

Perry’s curator stages historical scenes in a former palace. She rebuilds a reign from kitchen tallies and ledger scraps. Her King is fictional and unnamed. Centuries earlier, a royal court wrote the record she works from, and wrote it out of gossip. Perry puts the two in one book so the court can be caught at it. The King is a third brother, with both elder brothers dead. Taken down to the kitchen, he handles an egg for the first time and drops it. It rolls away intact. The cook asks whether the King has the hands of God. The staff pass it on. A miracle is in circulation. Watching one glimpse turn into history is the pleasure of the book. The court supplies the comedy. Letters call the King temperate and mouldable, and the Queen advises him to perform hunger where it is seen. The prose works the way the curator’s scenes do, detail set beside detail. Plastic fish stolen from another installation. Real herbs. One lecture is the fault. The curator tells a half-empty room about resin apples in a Turin museum and states the thesis outright, that no record should be final. The novel had spent itself showing that. Said aloud, the demonstration turns into a position.

The first chapter of The End of Everything is set on a coast where the sea washes up artefacts every day. Phillip Tennent, a beachcomber, carries his latest find up from the tideline wrapped in rags. It is about the size of a baby. The artefacts were discarded by the iGhetti, entities that have altered Britain without saying what they are or what they want. Harrison leaves them unexplained to the end. Part One gathers emails, notebooks, signals and hypotheses around them. None of them explains the whole. Hampson, a recluse on the Downs, spends years trying to read transmissions through artefacts. Marnie, a painter of seventy, is used to images that do not settle. Part Two, Marnie’s Holiday, drops the documents and sends her north by road. The split is the book’s clock. Explanation gathers, then Part Two walks away from it. Violence and landscape share one register. A body can be shot, and the next sentences move on to weather or food. Once, that speed costs the book an aftermath. Anyone who can live without answers will find a coast drawn with botanical precision, where the light stops behaving.

Stuart runs a different clock. Where Harrison splits his book in two, Stuart lets the truth surface by degrees, at the loom and in the language. On the ferry to Harris, a woman asks Cal who he belongs to. His answer, John of John of Iain of Iain the weaver, supplies the title. Cal has spent four years on the mainland. He has been at art school. His father, John Macleod, is a deacon and a weaver whose authority rests on religious certainty and endurance. John teaches his son to weave until their beating matches and the finished cloth conceals the work of two men. Cal is afraid at once. He could stay at that loom until he is older than his father. Gaelic binds them too, a private claim between father and son that shuts out Ella, the grandmother who helped raise Cal. Readers drawn to fathers and sons will find a close account of how a life is handed down through work and language before anyone agrees to it. The closing stretch hurries. It leans on plot pressure the earlier chapters rarely need. Before he reaches his father’s house, Cal crouches in a bus shelter and repacks his bag. A gay newspaper goes beneath the lining, under dirty laundry. His mother’s discarded Bible goes on top.