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Was the EU referendum dreamed up by a cabal of nefarious, lie-spewing insects? McEwan’s wacky satire will invigorate remainers
“That morning, Jim Sams, clever but by no means profound, woke from uneasy dreams to find himself transformed into a gigantic creature.” Ian McEwan’s enjoyable, cockeyed Brexit satire opens by tipping a gigantic wink to Kafka’s Metamorphosis, a work it in no way resembles. The set up is that a cockroach wakes up in No 10 after a big night, finds it is a hungover and very Boris-like prime minister, and, once it gets used to the unpleasant feeling of having an internal skeleton and a fleshy tongue in its mouth, sets about steering the UK into a popularly acclaimed national disaster. The bug is helped by the intuitive discovery – something to do with the pheromonal cockroach hivemind, I guess – that most of the cabinet are also now secretly cockroaches.
Kafka’s opening premise looks as though it wants to be a dream-image, a metaphor or an allegory, but the story then works through it with a dismayingly fastidious realism. McEwan makes a great deal of the reversal itself, but then doesn’t always tie it in to the subsequent action. In fact, Swift is the more obvious ancestor here – with much the best and funniest idea in the book being the Swiftian absurdity of the national project that stands in for Brexit. Continue reading...