THE COCKROACH

IAN MCEWAN

Vintage, 112pp, £7.99

Ian Mcewan’s re-imagining of Kafka’s Metamorphosis as a Brexit parable got a tepid response from reviewers. Mcewan’s cockroach wakes up to find he is a human prime minister whose cabinet is composed of ministers who are secretly cockroaches.

Fintan O’toole in the Observer was better disposed than most, opining that ‘Mcewan’s comic parable at least provides some relief from a political farce that has long gone beyond a joke’. But Phillip Hensher thought it a dud, not least because the author was not up to speed on political procedures: ‘If the novelist is asking his reader to believe one huge impossible thing, it’s reckless to pile minor implausibilities on top.’ In the New Statesman Leo Robson was defeated: ‘As you move through the book, it becomes less clear what it has to do with either Kafka or Brexit.’

Johanna Thomas-corr was left unmoved in the Times: ‘Beneath the splashy concept what is there? Bewildered disbelief; condescending outrage; mirthful detachment.’ And in the Evening Standard, David Sexton thought it ‘a feeble attempt to make a joke of what is no joke’. ‘Mcewan has constructed a fable to please all those who find it incomprehensible that anyone could support Brexit. For all his glorious fluency, he can’t emphasise with such people himself. So he has designated them cockroaches. That’s what the Hutus called the Tutsis (“invenzi”) to dehumanise them.’ It’s an idea that falls, as Sam Leith in the Guardian observed, ‘in the heat rather than light department.’