The Cockroach runs to less than 100 pages, and was obviously written quickly, in a state of intense anger. It takes as a starting point Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis and cleverly turns it on its head – a cockroach is turned into a human being. At first he finds the clumsy nature of the body he has acquired, with its floppy limbs and internal skeleton hard to cope with. In his mouth “a slab of slippery meat lay squat and wet”. Because he no longer has compound eyes, everything appears “oppressively colourful”. His head is large, and his eyes can move. His skeleton is covered in flesh. Slowly it is revealed that this isn’t any random human that he has been turned into, but the Prime Minister, Jim Sams, who bears a profoundly close similarity to the man who is at the time of writing, but hopefully not much longer, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

Kafka is fairly quickly left behind, as the new Prime Minister launches a plan to implement an economic policy so insane that only a thinly disguised President Trump can support it. The UK is driven through the looking glass into a world in which up is down, lies are truth, Parliament is the enemy of democracy, and the constitution is there to be ignored. McEwan’s solution to how Brexit could be forced through Parliament even though the Government doesn’t have a majority was inspired. For months we were told that Johnson and Cummings had a cunning plan which only four or five people had been told about, but that would see Brexit delivered on 31st October. That was all horseshit, but McEwan could have worked it for them it he had been so inclined. I bet they are kicking themselves! Job done, the cockroaches return to their previous form, but not before one is trodden on, thereby providing a tasty snack for his partners in crime.

Reviewers have consistently compared this novella to the work of Jonathan Swift, which is extraordinarily high praise indeed. Swift’s work often seems driven by anger, and here McEwan rages at the stupidity of Brexit (without mentioning it) as a massive act of national self harm which can only be rationally explained by metaphor. There are of course many economic and political explanations for the forces that led to the Brexit vote (and Trump’s election) but you won’t find any analysis of those forces here. Instead this is a cathartic rage against the forces of darkness threatening our country, forces that don’t read novels and don’t really care for reading anything else much either.

McEwan’s website helpfully summarises his motivations in The Cockroach, although we could probably have worked these out for ourselves – nevertheless the clarity is useful:

‘As the nation tears itself apart, constitutional norms are set aside, parliament is closed down so that the government cannot be challenged at a crucial time and ministers lie about it shamelessly in the old Soviet style, and when many Brexiters in high places seem to crave the economic catastrophe of a no deal, and English national extremists are attacking the police in Parliament Square, a writer is bound to ask what he or she can do. There’s only one answer: write. The Cockroach is a political satire in an old tradition. Mockery might be a therapeutic response, though it’s hardly a solution. But a reckless, self-harming, ugly and alien spirit has entered the minds of certain politicians and newspaper proprietors. They lie to their supporters. They express contempt for judges and the rule and norms of law. They seem to want to achieve their ends by means of chaos. What’s got into them? A cockroach or two, I suspect.’

Reviewers struggled to appreciate this novel, despite it being a very simple parable and despite McEwan’s even simpler translation above. The New Statesman’s judgment was that:

“If the book cannot be considered any kind of addition to the oeuvre, it is at the very least a coda to more substantive ventures, and another clue in the ongoing quest to understand what really matters to McEwan”

This misses the point spectacularly. Literature is not a guessing game where the novelist,  slowly reveals text by text clues to “what matters” to him or her. If you manage to read The Cockroach without working out within a few pages that McEwan is angry as hell with the state of the United Kingdom in 2019 then all the clues in the world aren’t going to help you divine what matters to him. 

The Guardian had reservations about McEwan’s use of cockroaches as an image for the Cabinet:

“Comparing one’s political opponents to cockroaches is a toxic metaphor with a nasty political history and it is hard to read McEwan’s novella without a degree of discomfort.”

The Spectator, formerly edited by the Cockroach in chief himself, had similar reservations:

“For many of us, it will never be at all OK to describe democratically elected politicians as ‘cockroaches’. It was the word by which the génocidaires in Rwanda called their adherents to action”

This is the same Spectator that ran an article in 2015 headed “She’s wrong but Katie Hopkins has a right to call migrants cockroaches”. Satire may be on the critical list, but irony is not dead!