Black Bag - Luke Kennard
I will not be surprised if Black Bag wins the Booker Prize this year.
This was the book on the longlist I was least excited to pick up, the sixth one I've read so far, but enough people had told me how much fun they were having with it that I made an effort to go in with an open mind. I didn't want my preconceptions to colour the whole experience before I'd even opened it. I wanted to be pleasantly surprised. And for the first hundred pages or so, that's exactly what happened.
I put up a post the other day gushing about the opening paragraph, and I stand by it - it might be the strongest opening on the longlist so far. The prose is snappy and stylish, frequently funny in a way that never seems to be straining for the laugh, and the narrator is very likeable to begin with. The whole milieu of dinner party mysteries and shambolic amateur theatre he's tangled up in is a fun, strange little world to spend time in, and the scenario with the black bag itself is compellingly weird. I was locked in. I was ready to have a proper good time with this.
At one point Black Bag sits through a lecture where someone observes that people only really remember the first ten percent and the last ten percent of a talk. If the same were true of novels, I'd be sat here telling you this was one of my favourite reads of the year. The first hundred pages are great. The last thirty are good. Unfortunately novels don't work like lectures, and I can't say the same for the hundred pages sandwiched in between, where the book lost me almost completely. I was seriously weighing up DNFing it around the halfway point. I'd become bored, increasingly fed up with the main character, and I had the distinct sense that nothing was happening - that the book was just spinning its wheels and going on and on with itself.
The relationship the narrator strikes up with Justine, a professor at the university where he's working, is the part that really did it in for me. I simply didn't buy that this successful, attractive woman would spend her afternoons in the office grinding away against a black leather bag with a man she'd never met sealed inside it. It didn't ring true, and it read to me like a strange bit of male wish fulfilment - a fantasy of getting all the benefits of a relationship with a powerful, desirable woman without doing any of the work of actually building one. If that's meant as satire, it didn't land for me. It just felt like juvenile wank material, frankly, and I was bored and more than a little irritated for a solid two hundred pages because of it.
Sunk cost is genuinely the only reason I didn't put this down. And it's more than a little ironic that one of the lectures Black Bag sits through, right around the book's midpoint, is specifically about the sunk cost fallacy. I can't decide whether Luke Kennard knew exactly how much of a slog the middle of his own book is and decided to have a laugh at the reader's expense, or whether that's me reading too much into a coincidence. Either way, it's a strange thing to put in a book that then tests your resolve to keep reading it.
I didn't hate this. The opening is excellent and the ending is genuinely enjoyable, but the highs aren't high enough to drag the sagging middle up to their level, and the overall impression I'm left with is that this is just fine. Aggressively fine, even. I think this lands around a five out of ten for me, which currently puts it at the bottom of my Booker longlist ranking.
The silver lining is that the Booker has a habit of alternating - some years I love the winner, some years the book I liked least of the lot takes it home, and it tends to go back and forth between those two. I'm in a fallow year this year, where I expect the book o hate most to win. Going by that pattern, and given how strong the rest of the longlist has been so far, this might well be exactly the kind of book that wins this year. So if nothing else disappoints me the way this did, you're probably looking at the Booker winner.