I am not, as I said a couple of weeks ago, really the right reader for literary humour. It’s not something I’m very good at parsing, as someone who reads primarily for plot and symbol rather than tone or character. A work that is entirely humorous – that doesn’t, for instance, take its own comedic premise seriously – will more likely than not read to me as inconsequential and forgettable.
So it is with Ian McEwan’s Brexit satire The Cockroach, a reversal of Kafka’s Metamorphosis in which a cockroach wakes up in the body of the prime minister, bent on enacting a disastrous economic policy with the help of his similarly cockroach-ified cabinet.
I think my main problem with this sort of work is its self-indulgence. Who benefits from a text like this? What does it add to the cultural conversation? It’s not going to change minds or encourage readers to examine their biases and preconceptions; for all its undoubted eloquence, the jokes and comparisons it makes have already been made by any number of left-leaning social media feeds. Boris Johnson may deserve to be likened to a cockroach, and it may make us feel briefly better to do so; but does it actually get us very far? Is this not, in fact, a collective, consolatory wallowing in our middle-class liberal discomfort?
I’d be responding to this differently, I think, if it wasn’t an Ian McEwan book; a book written, in other words, by supposedly one of our finest literary minds. As it is, I expected it to add more to the literary scene than Five on Brexit Island. Give me the rage that bubbles just under the skin of the comedic novels of Terry Pratchett any day; give me the radical socialism of China Mieville; give me something of substance to help me deal with the left’s crisis over this thin, conventional “satire”.
The English Student 