The Cockroach by Ian McEwan (2019)

 It's great to know that the current literary world contains the wish to do something like this. It often seems quite a solemn, tamed place of too much caution, scads of humourlessness and a lack of brio. As I've been saying a lot lately about 'authors of note', this is my first McEwan. If this is any indication of the quality of the rest of his oeuvre, then I have a treat in store. It takes as a starting point a kidding reversal of The Metamorphosis, whereby a Houses of Parliament cockroach scuttles his way into Number 10 and finds himself the following morning transformed into the PM - a thinly disguised Boris Johnson. It's deftly done, with echoes of some of the crucial comments and impressions in the original about scanning unfamiliar limbs and consternation about being on one's back. But we leave Kafka behind largely at this point, instead hiving off into a satire of the Brexit period, pictured in this instance as a crazed campaign for "Reversalism", which involves paying to be at work, and shopping like mad to be given more money along with our selected goods, so that we can pay to work the next day, thus ensuring constant work and constant consumption. We discover that all the members of the cabinet are also transmogrified cockroaches, and work via their pheromonal hive mentality to get the Reversalist job done, appealing to populism, and disposing of opponents with any scheisterism necessary. Trump is canvassed as Archie Tupper, a president with the same unkenable and childish variousness of response and a party falling in with him obsequiously. There was probably scope for more here; he's limned a little lightly. There's what I think may be a complication too far toward the end, when we discover that the inhabiting cockroaches of the Reversalist period are only temporary ones, brought in to get the work completed. As they scuttle out of Downing Street in the winter gloom they miss seeing "the little creature scurrying towards Number Ten to resume its life". So, Boris is a cockroach anyway, but to get Brexit done he needed a special access of particular roachiness? But this is a lovely, heartening thing, all the same, for politics and for literature.