Book of the week: The Cockroach by Ian McEwan

Announced only a fortnight ago, The Cockroach, a 100-page novella, is Ian McEwan’s second work of fiction to be published this year, after his novel about an intelligent android, Machines Like Me.

Brexit drove him to write, McEwan told the Today programme. “I just had to get it off my chest, I had to deal with this matter in writing, I just felt that humour and satire were probably the only response left to me.” He has been tormented by Brexit. “I’m like a sort of addict of the thing, I don’t want to hear about it but I can’t stop.” 

The word “Brexit” does not appear in this book, however, an attempt to reassert the imaginative power of fiction over brute fact and the chaos of the news. 

The Cockroach opens with a sly inversion of Kafka’s Metamorphosis as a cockroach, previously resident in the Palace of Westminster, wakes up to find himself disturbingly transformed into a human being, missing his multiple legs, his exoskeleton and his compound eyes, revolted by having a tongue and an “unsegmented thorax”. 

He has taken over the body of Jim Sams (as it might be, Gregor Samsa), the Prime Minister, in charge of a country in crisis. McEwan has a little more fun with the idea that Jim is a cockroach (he finds it hard to resist snapping up a dying bluebottle) but, after this bravura opening, he pretty much drops the metamorphosis conceit to launch into straightforward political satire. 

The great debate in the country is between the Reversalists and the Clockwisers, as it were, Brexiteers and Remainers. 

Reversalism, once “a thought experiment, an after-dinner game, a joke… the preserve of eccentrics, of lonely men who wrote compulsively to the newspapers in green ink,” is the belief that everything will be better if all transactions are turned on their head. “Let the money flow be reversed and the entire economic system, even the nation itself, will be purified, purged of absurdities, waste and injustice.” So people pay out to have jobs but they are paid to shop, etc. 

This absurdity has been voted for in a referendum. McEwan is a bit embarrassed to explain how the Reversalists won, putting it down to “an unacknowledged alliance between the working poor and the old of all classes. The former had no stake in the status quo and nothing to lose, and they looked forward to bringing home essential goods as well as luxuries, and to being cash rich, however briefly. The old, by way of cognitive dimming, were nostalgically drawn to what they understood to be a proposal to turn back the clock. Both groups, poor and old, were animated to varying degrees by nationalist zeal.”

This peculiarly patronising passage is McEwan’s best shot in The Cockroach at understanding how something so retrogade could ever have won the popular vote. 

The rest of the novella is self-satisfied amusement, almost a merry caper. Sams, previously a closet Clockwiser, becomes, now that he’s a cockroach, a hard Reversalist and he is delighted, at his first Cabinet meeting, to realise that all his ministers are cockroaches too, except the foreign secretary, the cockroach who should have taken over his body perhaps having got accidentally squashed en route. 

The PM forms an alliance with the moronic US President, Archie Tupper, finding him so enthusiastic about “Revengelism”, as Tupper calls it, that he ventures to ask him if he once had six legs himself. Then he wins a vote in Parliament, to impose hard Reversal on Christmas Day, by gross trickery (involving parliamentary pairing, rather than proroguing).

Their work done, the cockroaches celebrate their achievement. “As our Latin name, blattodea, suggests, we are creatures that shun the light. We understand and love the dark.” Then they quit their human bodies and scuttle home to the “pleasantly decaying” Palace of Westminster.

McEwan has constructed a fable here to please all those who find it incomprehensible that anyone could support Brexit. For all his glorious fluency, he can’t empathise with such people himself. So he has designated them cockroaches. 

That’s what the Hutus called the Tutsis (“inyenzi”) to dehumanise them. It’s a term that brought Katie Hopkins into disgrace. The Cockroach is not a book to cast any light on our polarisation. 

It is, rather, a feeble attempt to make a joke of what is no joke. Still, that’s indicative in itself. 

The Cockroach by Ian McEwan (Cape, £7.99), buy it here.