Ian McEwan
Photo: Penguin Books The Cockroach
by Ian McEwan (Jonathan Cape, £7.99/€11.00)
Felix M. Larkin
Since the Brexit referendum in 2016, it often seems that events have overtaken satire – indeed, have made satire redundant. However, the distinguished author of such contemporary masterpieces as Atonement and Amsterdam, Ian McEwan has produced a novella which will stand as the definitive satirical commentary on the political disaster that has befallen our neighbours in the United Kingdom.
In a mirror image of the conceit in Kafka’s Metamorphosis (in which Gregor Samsa awakes to find that he has been transformed into a beetle), McEwan has cockroaches take over the bodies of an ineffectual British prime minister, Jim Sams, and his cabinet in order to implement a bizarre policy initiative which is stalled – because of its monumental stupidity.
That policy is Reversalism, and what it seeks to do is reverse the flow of money so that employees pay to work and when they go shopping, they are given in cash the retail price of everything they buy. They would then use that money to enable themselves to continue working. The policy has been endorsed by a referendum, but the cockroaches fear that it is going to be abandoned and are impelled to act in order to save it.
Once they have invaded the bodies of the cabinet members, nothing is allowed to stand in the way of putting the policy into effect. Dissenters are mendaciously defamed and sidelined, constitutional sleights-of-hand are resorted to, the misgivings of allies overseas are contemptuously dismissed and the assistance of an unscrupulous US President is bought.
When the policy has been successfully foisted upon the country, the cockroaches abandon the human bodies they have colonised and return to their natural state – leaving the humans, now restored to their bodies, to deal with the mess created by Reversalism.
Dissenters are mendaciously defamed and sidelined”
And what motivated the cockroaches to act as they did? It is all explained at the end of the novella: “Where they [humans] have embraced poverty, filth, squalor, we [the cockroaches] have grown in strength. And by tortuous means, and much experiment and failure, we have come to know the preconditions for such human ruin.”
The message is that the cockroaches embraced Revivalism in order to weaken the fabric of human society, and that is clearly McEwan’s view of the likely effect of Brexit in the UK.
He does, however, assure us in a witty disclaimer that “this novella is a work of fiction…and any resemblance to actual cockroaches, living or dead, is entirely coincidental”.