“That morning, Jim Sams, clever but by no means profound, woke from uneasy dreams to find himself transformed into a gigantic creature.” Ian McEwan’s enjoyable, cockeyed Brexit satire opens by tipping a gigantic wink to Kafka’s Metamorphosis, a work it in no way resembles. The set up is that a cockroach wakes up in No 10 after a big night, finds it is a hungover and very Boris-like prime minister, and, once it gets used to the unpleasant feeling of having an internal skeleton and a fleshy tongue in its mouth, sets about steering the UK into a popularly acclaimed national disaster. The bug is helped by the intuitive discovery – something to do with the pheromonal cockroach hivemind, I guess – that most of the cabinet are also now secretly cockroaches.
Kafka’s opening premise looks as though it wants to be a dream-image, a metaphor or an allegory, but the story then works through it with a dismayingly fastidious realism. McEwan makes a great deal of the reversal itself, but then doesn’t always tie it in to the subsequent action. In fact, Swift is the more obvious ancestor here – with much the best and funniest idea in the book being the Swiftian absurdity of the national project that stands in for Brexit.
“Reversalism”, which Jim Sams champions on a “do or die” basis, is an unorthodox economic theory. The country will reverse the flow of money, so that you pay a salary to be allowed to work, and “earn” the money to pay your salary by going shopping, where the shops pay you to take away goods. The theory is that full employment and national renewal will result. There are shades of Swift’s Big-Endians v Little-Endians in the viciousness of the divide between Reversalists and their “Clockwise” opponents; and of his Laputan sunbeams-from-cucumbers project in Reversalism itself. There’s also a flavour of Pynchonian nuttiness, and of David Foster Wallace’s very funny riff on a progressive sales tax in The Pale King. You can tell by the space McEwan spends on it how tickled he is by the idea (indeed, this being McEwan, he can’t resist discussing it with special reference to the second law of thermodynamics).
In the ground-level political satire there’s much to enjoy in a slightly clunking way. We meet a spad who has the Steve Hilton/Dominic Cummings dress sense (“He had a grey three-day beard and wore trainers and a black silk suit over a Superman T-shirt”). The US president is the spit of Donald Trump and is called “Archie Tupper” – half Elizabethan dirty joke, half tribute (perhaps) to Don Marquis’s literary cockroach Archy. There are sharp spoofs of populist rhetoric, tabloid idiocy and cabinet-level skulduggery. There’s a bit of business with a British fishing ship rammed by a French vessel, and the cynical diplomatic huffery-puffery that follows, which seems horribly plausible.
And there’s a suggestive moment when the German chancellor asks Jim plaintively: “Why are you doing this? To what end, are you tearing your nation apart?”
There drifted through the PM’s mind a number of compelling answers, though he did not utter them. Because. Because that’s what we’re doing. Because that’s what we believe in. Because that’s what we said we’d do. Because that’s what people said they wanted. Because I’ve come to the rescue. Because. That, ultimately, was the only answer: because.
Then reason began to seep back and with relief he recalled a word from his speech the evening before. “Renewal,” he told her. “And the electric plane.” After an anxious pause, it came in a rush. Thank God. “Because, Madame Chancellor, we intend to become clean, green, prosperous, united, confident and ambitious!”
The big problem is that it’s not clear at all how the Brexit spoof meshes with the cockroach-turned-human premise. Kafka doesn’t ask you to consider the how or the why of his scenario. McEwan can’t swerve it – and scatters unanswered but nagging questions as he goes. How does a cockroach remember the 1960s song “Walking Back to Happiness”? Why does the transfiguration, which seems to be a baffling accident on the opening pages, end up looking like a worked-out plan by the cockroach hivemind in the closing ones? Were cockroaches behind it all along, even though the referendum had happened long before a cockroach woke up as the prime minister? And the “rightful owners” of the “borrowed bodies”, who, we’re told at the end, are going to return to human form - where have they been all this time?
These are daft questions to have to ask; but if the book is to be more than simply one daft thing after another – if it’s to cohere in any satisfying way – it needs to provide or allow for answers. At the end, the reader still isn’t sure why this story needed to involve a cockroach/human transformation at all.
As satire, it may cheer and invigorate the admittedly sizable constituency that regards Brexit as being no less insane an idea than unilaterally reversing the laws of economics, and one that could plausibly have been hatched by a cabal of nefarious, murderous, lie‑spewing human cockroaches. But that falls into the heat rather than light department. All McEwan’s fluency is here, and much of his wit (though broad comedy has never been the centre of his talent) – but, like Jim Sams or Gregor Samsa, the end result is neither one thing nor the other.
• The Cockroach is published by Vintage (£7.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
