McEwan’s biting Brexit satire is an exhilarating delight
The Cockroach Ian McEwan, Jonathan Cape, €8.99
AT a mere 100 pages, this book gave me the most fun I’ve had in one afternoon for a very long time.
From its first line, “That morning, Jim Sams, clever but by no means profound, woke from uneasy dreams to find himself transformed into a gigantic creature”, McEwan transports us to an entirely credible world, where just about anything is possible. So far, so welcome-to-2019.
Jim Sams, is a Palace of Westminster cockroach who wakes up to find that he is a man — a man who happens to be the British prime minister.
This initial play on Kafka’s The Metamorphosis ends after the first couple of pages and thereafter the book becomes a sharp-witted political satire worthy of Swift.
Sams soon discovers that almost the entire British cabinet has been similarly taken over by cockroaches, eager to push “the Project” through parliament.
The farcical project is reversalism — an absurd economic system which reverses the flow of money. Workers pay to work and they, in turn, are paid to shop.
Countries pay to export their goods and are paid to take imports. Much to the delight of the clockwisers, who oppose the reversalists, other than the UK only St Kitts and Nevis are on board with reversalism.
Pre-transformation Jim Sams was seen as weak. “You’re a closet clockwiser. Not with the Project. Not a true go-it-alone man. Getting nothing through parliament.”
The newly cockroached PM, however, is a Boris Johnson-like figure, prepared to “go-it-alone” with real gusto.
This book is fun — that slightly terrified, sick-feeling kind of fun, experienced, perhaps, at the top of a very scary roller coaster.
The obvious parallels with the
Brexit debacle render this novella very close to the bone: Sams is told by his adviser to prorogue parliament for a few months, for example.
Reversalism was discussed, quite seriously, at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944, we are told. McEwan peppers the story with non-facts like this, alongside details which we know to be true.
Thus, a recent chancellor is called George Osborne and the US president has all the hallmarks of the current, real-life incumbent.
We are dragged down a rabbit-hole where we can no longer tell truth from fiction.
And this, for me, is the core of the book.
When I checked (because yes, I actually began to believe that in these strange times the economic model called reversalism existed) I found that reversalism is, in reality, the idea that what is true about the universe is the exact opposite of what a person or group believes.
This book should be read by everyone. The prose is clever, funny and a joy to read, as we have come to expect from Booker Prize-winning McEwan.
It is an exhilarating, if slightly horrifying, ride. Far be it from me to suggest that the elite of the British establishment are like cockroaches — eternal and unencumbered by ethics.
I’ll leave that up to Mister McEwan.