Steve_Bamlett_blog

Reading Cockroach Ian McEwan (2019) London, Jonathan Cape

With no reference to ‘actual cockroaches’, similarities to humans of the cockroaches & humans herein are open for recognition. This is the basic premise: that were cockroaches to metamorphosise (reversing the Kafka direction) into humans, they would support a cause that reduced the human world to disorder, and the production primarily of piles of excrement, on which they would, once safely cockroaches again, not only subsist but thrive. What then better that the cockroaches and his mates, male & female, became the Prime Minister and the cabinet.

This basic conceit is the whole of this topical novella and that isn’t a recipe for a work of art but an amusing riff on the sad present, trying to mine it for humour. I don’t think I found it that funny, the basic premise having raised a smile that someone noticed the awfulness of the current political situation. The dangers of populism are well noticed – the Trump figure comes across as rather genial and thick (which underplays his danger), if not the Johnson figure, whose creative evil is convincingly and flabbily accurate as he ‘hugged the shadows of the gutter’ (p. 5).

The particular awful narrative judgment seems to be reserved for the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, once returned to cockroach form. This seems personal but I can’t help but see the resemblance of this insect to a figure currently living and kicking in its own rhetorical mire.

I don’t find the humour liberating. It is chilling. The human actors on the right seem even worse than McEwan imagines his insects. But the climate change material (p. 61f.) is precise and wonderful and the real achievement except when it fades into an allegory of the books basic conceit on p. 62:

Turmoil and reduced visibility was everywhere.

So don’t expect relief from the pain of politics here. It is a Swiftian excremental vision without release and we are still in its actual sticky clutches. I couldn’t read it twice for that reason, but McEwan is doing his bit here, and hopefully it reminds artists that there is no neutrality, even though their first duty is to the quality of their complex imaginations.