Booker Longlist 2026: Books #4, #5 and #6

Next three are done, and this time, I wasn't as impressed (although I am sure views will differ!) My next two, as I approach the halfway mark, is Douglas Stuart's John of John, one of the heavy hitters (and favourites to win), and the highly praised All Them Dogs, so I am preparing for bedazzlement :-)

The rolling list is below.

1. The Shadow of the Object by Chloe Aridjis
2. Switzy by Emma Cline
3. Helen of Nowhere by Makenna Goodman
✅4. The End of Everything by M. John Harrison: 5/10
5. The Disappearers by Marlon James
✅6. Black Bag by Luke Kennard: 7/10
7. The Renovation by Kenan Orhan
✅8. May We Feed the King by Rebecca Perry: 8.5/10
✅9. The Palm House by Gwendoline Riley: 6/10
✅10. The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout: 9.5/10
11. John of John by Douglas Stuart
12. All Them Dogs by Djamel White
✅13. The Vivisectors by Missouri Williams: 5/10

The End of Everything by M. John Harrison: 5/10

Have we got up to one of the Booker Stinkers already? Well ... maybe. Sort of. It certainly wasn't (to me) *good*, but it's elegantly written, so I'm not sure I'd quite go Full Stinkeroo on it. (It's the frequently lyrical twist to the writing that saved it from falling below a 5).

The premise, such as it is - we are in a post-collapse (details fuzzy) Britain, down on the coast, where Philip Tennent is making his living beachcombing to gather up flotsam from the sea. The collapse is associated with the arrival (or is it?) of the iGhetti, some kind of alien (or are they?) or interdimensional (maybe?) beings (or not?), who have a vague set of ill-defined capacities and have somehow taken over the city of London, although not really, but also yes, and I don't really know where we are or who we are anymore...

Philip and his aunt, erstwhile artist Marnie, are the protagonists of the book, insofar as it can be said to have protagonists, but neither really worked for me, for different reasons. The flat, almost bored tone with which the very considerable brutality in the book was described was really off-putting and not in a way that served the plot or the themes I *think* it was going for, it just came off as gratuitous. 

So, overall, this book just did not hit for me. It was weird, and not in a good way; and where it wasn't hopelessly opaque, the analogies were heavy-handed to the point of irritation (yes yes yes, climate change bad, Brexit bad, I get it). I've read so many better dystopias. It will be very disappointing if this one does snaffle the Booker or even shortlist.

The Vivisectors by Missouri Williams: 5/10

I am actually quite sad to be rating this one so low, because I really liked the start and was quite captured by the set-up. In the end, this comes down not just to over-egged writing that couldn't pull off a coherent narrative, but a choking lack of clarity about what the central themes of the book were supposed to be.

Our narrator lives in a place which is in serious (probably climate-induced) decline - a university city somewhere in England, with drastically reduced population and a forest / plant life that is inexorably advancing on the buildings. Power in the city is divided between the university hierarchy and the loose league of gardeners who work to hold back the plant overrun (with very limited success). Early in the book, Williams evocatively conveys what it's like to live in a place that is so far past its glory:

"Once, he said, it had been lively. He remembered squares filled with laughter, light, intrigue and romance, the soldiers who had fought duels and the writers who had written about them, and he remarked that though the literary output of the city had even then been prodigious, its powers of commentary seemingly limitless – it had still been our city, after all, self-absorbed, introspective – there had been in turn something to animate that corpus, some sort of motor, an enormous entanglement of events and interests that it was their collective task to relate and record for posterity, which, he said, now a little sadly, seemed to have arrived. 

These days nobody cared for anything, least of all our history. When had our city become so exhausted? My uncle didn’t know. He wasn’t sure that he wanted to." 

I think the first problem with the book really arises from the negative personality of the narrator, and I mean negative in both senses of the word - she is both faintly repellent and at the same time dull / grey, barely there at all, which doesn't really work for the plot. The daughter of a long-established writing / academic family, she lives with her hapless uncle in one rotting / falling-apart house and visits her detestable father and newly vegetative mother (after a failed suicide attempt) in another rotting house elsewhere in the city, to be subjected to incredibly long stream of consciousness spews of vitriol that got drearily samey after a while. She works as the assistant (but actually the ghost doer-of) for a terrible academic who is an immigrant to the city with a massive chip on her shoulder, and she hates everyone, everything, and every minute of every day. (Which, again, gets repetitive really quickly).

There is a long, vague plot concerning a student of the university, Adam, who has a lengthy run-in with university administration in which both sides claim discrimination based on identity, although, as we are never told what anyone actually said or what their identities are, it feels too flimsy to bear the weight of the ideas. There's a decent thesis lurking in here about the perils of identity politics and the abandonment of material needs in favour of inchoate psychocultural ones, but again, Williams starts strong with this but then gets hopelessly lost the weeds of her own verbiage and lack of clarity about what she is trying to say.

There's also some pretty embarrassing passages about disability (especially autism) and trauma, which I thought were handled so badly as to be a real issue for the novel as a whole. 

All in all, I found it an unsuccessful novel on its own terms, despite having the seeds of something really potentially good (and some early passages with great promise). Certainly not a shortlister for me.

Black Bag by Luke Kennard: 7/10

This year's Booker judges are on one and no mistake. This is one of the weirdest books I have ever read - which is not to say I hated it, because I definitely didn't (although I do think it is too long, and that results in a soggy middle). I can't decide if it has profound observations to make or if it's a lot of wittily presented BS, but maybe the real answer is that it's a mixture of both.

If you want to know what it is about, that's deceptively simple on the surface. Our narrator, an unsuccessful out of work actor, gets a job from the Strange Acting Jobs website as (effectively) an experimental tool for a psychology professor. The dour and strange Dr Blend, his employer, tells him he must a) only appear on campus encased in a black leather bag b) attend classes and sit silently, not communicating with anyone and c) be barefoot, so all students will see is his lower legs emerging from the bag. (An aside - Unnamed Protagonist's (UP) voice reminded me overwhelmingly of Charles Arrowby in Irish Murdoch's The Sea, The Sea, although UP is less completely obnoxious. Perhaps it's the actorly affect).

This sounds weird as a framing, but it's actually based on a real experiment conducted by Charles Goetzinger in 1967 at Oregon State University (although Goetzinger was interested in the students' reactions, whereas the author of this book only cares about UP's subjectivity as it's the only one we get any kind of access to). I will say that this is the first major departure from reality that Kennard permits himself, because an experiment like this would neverrrrrr get ethics approval in 2026 :-)

However, if I was to tell you that things get substantially odder almost immediately, that would be an epic understatement. UP starts to develop a strange and deeply Freudian attachment to the bag. Another professor at the university, the completely unhinged Justine, starts up a bizarre and repellent sexual relationship with UP *but only when he is in encased in Black Bag* - she doesn't want to ever see his face. UP's best friend, Claudio, who is a successful gaming streamer, massive user of psychedelics, and has an eye to the main chance, pretty quickly starts devising ways to monetise Black Bag. There is a secret society of Black Baggers (I kid you not) and an AI movie and venture capitalists and faux kidnappings and a lot (a lot a lot) of men who feel sad and empty and whatnot. 

I think if the book has a thematic core, it's that masculinity is in a parlous state and men are lonely because they repress their emotions and don't express love for each other, and that this is responsible for a lot of the world's problems. I don't think Kennard really lands the plane with this thesis - the ideas are a little too jumbly to bring it all the way home - but it's a pretty entertaining and well-written journey for most of the way, if you can forgive a fair bit of repetition and a few plot bunnies that hop away in the middle never to be seen again.