It’s been difficult to miss Ian McEwan. The Cockroach, his satirical new Brexit novella, is his second book this year and his third in three years. The Cockroach is so toothless and wan that it may drive his readers away in long apocalyptic caravans. The young McEwan, the author of blacker-than-black little novels, the man who acquired the nickname 'Ian Macabre,' would rather have gnawed off his own fingers than written it. At dark political and social moments, we need better, rougher magic than this ... McEwan is hardly a dummy; he derives more than a few witty-ish moments from his premise. The best arrive early ... Once McEwan has established his premise, however, The Cockroach stalls. It devolves into self-satisfied, fish-in-barrel commentary about topics like Twitter and the tabloid press. The literary references...are plummy and tortured ... The idea of writing The Cockroach probably seemed, in the shower one morning, like a good one. Later, after coffee, it might have occurred to McEwan that suggesting your opponents are cockroaches might be to drop down to their carpet level.
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 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? 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...but, like Jim Sams or Gregor Samsa, the end result is neither one thing nor the other.
By the end of this short, occasionally elegant and no doubt cathartic fictional essay, McEwan has inadvertently given readers a fresh insight into the arrogance and contempt that liberal society feels towards those who have dared to defy it by voting for Brexit. For all the flourishes one would expect from a novelist of McEwan’s brilliance, this falls way short of his usual standard. There is little of the acuity and human insight of say, Saturday, his last heavily political novel, or even of Jonathan Coe’s Middle England. Instead, the work reads like a piece written in a blind fury ... No doubt there will be homes in the leafy suburbs of deepest Remainia where this work will be read with delight and celebrated for its humour and genius. For me, at least, it simply symbolised the self-righteous inability to understand the half of the country that does not have the innate good sense to agree with McEwan ... The descriptions of physical transformation are unsurprisingly excellent though [McEwan] is not the first author to riff on Kafka’s classic. But as soon as he returns to the pure politics, the intelligence gives way to unfiltered and uninquisitive rage. What a shame. A cold-headed, forensic McEwan on Brexit would have been worth reading.
...a swiftly written, bang-up-to-the-moment 'Brexit-inspired novella' that arrives with the haste of an emergency vehicle nobody ordered ... There is no doubting the sharpness of McEwan’s mind, nor his mastery of technical language (entomological and economic). But beneath the splashy concept what is there? Bewildered disbelief; condescending outrage; mirthful detachment ... McEwan used to be known as 'our national novelist' — and perhaps he still feels himself to be so. But he no longer seems interested in capturing the texture of human experience. The Cockroach is not only inert, bloodless and smug, it literally dehumanises the national drama. I can’t see it doing anything other than damaging the Remain cause.
...as satire it is pretty feeble stuff, hitting its targets as if ticking them off a list, from Trump’s tweets to the frothing nationalism of tabloid newspapers. Asking for a comparison with Kafka is even less sensible ... The Cockroach, by contrast, is a thin book that feels even thinner. There are some nice jokes...but otherwise it’s hard to escape the conclusion that if a less famous author had offered this to their publisher it would have been swiftly squashed.
The Cockroach aims not to persuade or in any profound sense to critique. It is written to comfort and entertain those who already believe that the Brexit project is deranged. And even in that McEwan faces a formidable challenge. Brexit has such a camp, knowing, performative quality that it is almost impossible to inflate it any further. How do you make a show of people who are doing such a fabulous job of making a show of themselves? McEwan manages to do so with great style and comic panache ... 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 ... This is dangerous terrain, and McEwan just about gets through it by stepping lightly and moving fast. What keeps him going is his brilliant answer to the question of what could possibly be more absurd than Brexit. He is far too clever to try to compete directly with the real goings-on in Whitehall and Westminster. Instead, the great political project that is roiling Britain is as elaborately bonkers as those that Gulliver encounters on his third voyage ... McEwan elaborates this great scheme in prose so finely wrought that the plan seems to have some genuine gravity. And this in turn makes it very funny. He cannot hope to laugh the terrible reality of Brexit out of existence, but McEwan’s comic parable at least provides some relief from a political farce that has long gone beyond a joke.
...self-satisfied amusement, almost a merry caper ... 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.
Where to begin? Kafka’s fable works so beautifully because there is a single impossible event, and then a man’s mind is within a giant insect. We all know that feeling of helpless entrapment from experiences of illness. The impossibilities of McEwan’s situation don’t mean anything to us, and just keep coming. How are we to know what the insect mind thinks about? How does it know how to move or speak? How does it understand the complex political situation? We are quickly lost in a quagmire of unconvincing explanations ... It was a mistake to engage with The Metamorphosis, however, because Kafka’s engine just can’t be run in reverse. But even without that, McEwan doesn’t seem to be quite up to speed on political minutiae.... if the novelist is asking his reader to believe one huge impossible thing, it’s reckless to pile minor implausibilities on top ... I really hoped this was going to work. It’s vital that novelists are invested in current political realities; and the turmoil of feeling, of identity, of brutal terror that Brexit is churning up needs a report on the ground ... This, alas, seems like a product of our communal confusion, rage, uncertainty and posturing, and not a depiction of it.
Though intended as a jeu d’esprit – if an exercise in hand-wringing can truly lay claim to that status – The Cockroach offers a more commanding display of its author’s strengths than Salman Rushdie’s similarly peeved though more outwardly hard-working Cervantes update, Quichotte. It even ends up generating one or two potent ideas, though admittedly not about populism or Europe ... The latest instalment in [McEwan's] imaginative scrambling of English social history and of reality itself ... The Cockroach seems to belong more squarely in the realm of fantasy or magic realism. But McEwan still finds room, amid all the Hansard send-ups and diplomatic silliness, to allude to more troubling physical-philosophical quandaries, while positing an alternative history of economic thought that culminates in a wayward version of our present ... 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.
...a seething Brexit satire, with a gigantic wink to Kafka’s The Metamorphosis ... Much of this slim volume is dedicated to giving Reversalism (and its insectivorous champions) a backstory, leaving scant room for allegorical insight ... for all of his exposition, explication and fury, McEwan shies away from confronting the root causes of Brexit ... With this disdainful, surface diagnosis – less a cultural vivisection than a rebuke – McEwan misses the opportunity to scrutinize Brexit from within. He is simply an aggrieved witness to other people’s stupidity ... Sometimes you need the clarity of a cultural bommy-knocker, but The Cockroach never transcends the feeling that it began life as a self-satisfied joke at a dull dinner party. 'Why are you doing this?' the German Chancellor implores McEwan’s PM. Jim’s answer feels like an explanation for this smug and petulant little volume: 'Because'.
...a concise, thinly veiled satire of the Brexit debacle ... While the satire is about as subtle as a punch to the face, there are moments of great clarity and insight regarding Britain’s current predicament. In all, this is an entertaining and cathartic novella written not only to uphold McEwan’s own sanity but also to rally any readers who share his view that Brexit is one symptom of a vacuous political world of almost unimaginable stupidity.
