If Boris Johnson comes on the television next week and says, ‘I just read The Cockroach and I’m revoking Article 50,’ I would be in heaven. But I don’t think it will happen. Ian Mcewan on his new novella
Satiric novella imagines a bug as the current British prime minister
The Cockroach Ian Mcewan Penguin Random House ERIC VOLMERS
Early in Ian Mcewan’s new novella, The Cockroach, our titular anti-hero comes across a steaming pile of dung while making his way past the Horse Guards Parade in London.
It’s actually a pre-transformation flashback for Jim. He is remembering his six-legged journey from the Palace of Westminster to 10 Downing Street, which is where he awakes at the beginning of the story inhabiting the strange new body of the British prime minister.
While preoccupied with the mission at hand, Jim also considers himself a bit of a manure “connoisseur” and is therefore tempted by this potential meal that emits a “nutty aroma, with hints of petroleum, banana skin and saddle soap.”
Despite the trademark elegance of Mcewan’s prose, it’s not the most subtle of metaphors.
“A big pile of dung is my view of Brexit,” Mcewan confirms, in an interview with Postmedia from his home in England.
At 100 pages, The Cockroach is the acclaimed author’s short and anything-but-sweet satire targeting what he sees as “one of the most pointless, masochistic decisions in the whole history of these islands.”
That would be Brexit, Britain’s scheduled withdrawal from the European Union that was formally put into action after a 2016 referendum and has plunged the country into political chaos ever since. This interview took place on Oct. 14, which means it was before the latest Brexit wrangling that includes pushing the deadline for a deal back yet again. (Early deadlines prevent an up-to-date account of what has happened since, especially with the situation changing daily.)
But Mcewan says he has been obsessing about Brexit for years.
“I’ve written, given speeches, been on two gigantic marches, read millions of words on it, watched endless television debates and listened to radio debates and reports, and it just seems to me a colossal absurdity and I’m amazed by it and also (find it) rather despairing,” he says. “I guess there is a point when despair meets laughter coming the other way, or an impulse to mockery or satire. I suddenly found myself writing this in the summer without really intending to. I wrote the first paragraph and then wrote the second and then thought, ‘Well, I’m going to write 20,000 words and see where it goes.’”
That first paragraph borrows heavily from the opening lines of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. In that 1915 novella, a salesman wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into an insect. In The Cockroach, the reverse happens. But after Jim’s initial discombobulation about transforming into a “gigantic creature” with only four limbs and a revolting “slab of slippery meat” that “lay squat and wet in his mouth,” he quickly adjusts and the reader learns his transformation is part of a larger conspiracy. It’s to implement a bizarre notion called Reversalism, a convoluted and ridiculous reverse-flow economic plan that involves employees paying their employers to work and shoppers being paid to take goods from stores. This is the political movement that dominates The Cockroach. Brexit is never mentioned.
“I must have been lying on my back in the bath,” says Mcewan, when asked how the notion of Reversalism came to him. “I don’t know, it just came somehow. I really wanted something manifestly absurd, but in a surface way stupidly coherent until it comes to trade with other countries, which is one of the problems of Brexit.”
Like many, Mcewan says he was surprised by the results of the 2016 referendum, in which 51.9 per cent voted to leave the European Union. Just as Jim The Cockroach and his counterparts have their reasons for causing instability, Mcewan says he thinks pro-brexit citizens were misled by political and media forces in the U.K. that favour a “highly deregulated economy with diminished workers’ rights, environmental rights.”
“So that naked capital can really go at it,” he says. “It’s a nuisance for them, all these safeguards in factories and safeguards of environmental protection or, in agriculture, high standards of husbandry and so on. There’s more money to be made. I honestly think it’s mostly down to that.”
Still, he didn’t think it would actually work.
“I hadn’t expected it, to be honest, any more than I had expected Trump,” says Mcewan. “I just had this immediate sense that people did not realize the extent to which our country is so stitched in at every level to the EU. I knew it was not going to be an easy matter of signing a piece of paper and suddenly we would be out. The whole national landscape, its ecology, is entirely the EU. In our agriculture, science, citizenship, trade, finance, I mean there is no corner of our public life that isn’t very much entrenched in this ecology.”
Whatever the case, Mcewan says he has no delusions about satire having the power to change people’s minds or anything else. While Kafka was an influence, so was Jonathan Swift. The 18th-century essayist and novelist wrote what Mcewan sees as the “foundational text for savage satire” with A Modest Proposal, a 1729 essay in which he suggests poor Irish people alleviate their poverty by selling their children as food to rich people. But even Swift seemed aware that satire changed nothing, Mcewan says.
“It’s a kind of release and it’s a protest for me,” he says. “Can you let this go by without doing something? You’re a writer, so get down to it and write. It’s the only thing we can do. If Boris Johnson comes on the television next week and says, ‘I just read The Cockroach and I’m revoking Article 50,’ I would be in heaven. But I don’t think it will happen.”
The Cockroach is the second work Mcewan has published this year. It follows the alternate-history novel Machines Like Me, which imagines a 1980s Britain where artificial-intelligence technology has progressed to a point where synthetic humans are available for purchase. His 2016 novella Nutshell was narrated by a fetus. It all seems to be marking a bit of a departure for the author. One of modern literature’s most imaginative storytellers, Mcewan’s bestknown works have tended to be more down-to-earth, meticulously plotted and researched affairs such as 1998’s Booker Prize-winning Amsterdam or 2001’s Atonement.
“Without planning to or choosing to consciously, I seem to have entered in my 70s into a kind of antic, mischievous sense of abandoning the realism which I’ve pursued for most of my life in fiction,” he says. “I do have a strong impulse to cut loose from all those novels I painstakingly researched and made all my characters obey the law of physics. Maybe it’s just that sense of having little time left. When you enter your 70s, you are really aware of the limited time allotted. Maybe there is something comic about the human fate that one starts to be aware of; comic rather than tragic. Maybe a kind of distance is opening up.”
I’ve written, given speeches, been on two gigantic marches, read millions of words on it, watched endless television debates and listened to radio debates and reports, and it just seems to me a colossal absurdity and I’m amazed by it and also (find it) rather despairing.