 First edition (UK) | |
| Author | Ian McEwan |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | Suzanne Dean |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Jonathan Cape (UK) Knopf (Canada) Anchor Books (US) |
Publication date | 2019 |
| Publication place | United Kingdom |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 100 |
| ISBN | 1-5291-1292-3 |
The Cockroach is a satirical novella by the author Ian McEwan, published in 2019 by Jonathan Cape, inspired by Kafka's The Metamorphosis and loosely based on the ramifications of Brexit.
On Book Marks, the book received a "pan" consensus, based on eleven critic reviews: three "positive" and one "mixed" and seven "pan". [1] In Books in the Media, a site that aggregates critic reviews of books, the book received a 
(2.35 out of 5) from the site which was based on eleven critic reviews. [2]
McEwan on the Today Programme , declined an invitation to say something conciliatory about Leave voters. "Let’s stop pretending that there are two sides to this argument," he says. "There aren't. I'm sorry. When I'm abroad and people say, 'What the f*** are you doing?' I say, 'I don't know. I wish I could give you some arguments for it." [3]
McEwan doubts The Cockroach will be his last word on the subject. "I think I will get back to it. I probably have to get back to it.” He hopes readers find the novella “therapeutic” but doesn't expect it to change any minds. "I’m afraid the people who like it will probably be Remainers and the people who loathe it will be Brexiters. That's the world we have now. No one’s going to say, ‘I’ve just read The Cockroach and I’m becoming a Remainer.' If only! So I don’t flatter myself that I'm going to have any impact on this process." [3]
A cockroach takes over the body of the prime minister of the UK and finds itself in 10 Downing Street. All of his cabinet except the foreign secretary are also cockroaches in 'superficial human form'. Instead of Brexit is the theory of Reversalism in which the flow of money is reversed. Workers pay money to their employers, and in turn are paid to shop. Trade functions by exporters giving Britain money to take their goods; Britain will in turn pay other countries to import its products and services. [4]
Fintan O'Toole in The Guardian praises the novella "It is written to comfort and entertain those who already believe that the Brexit project is deranged. And even in that McEwan faces a formidable challenge. Brexit has such a camp, knowing, performative quality that it is almost impossible to inflate it any further. How do you make a show of people who are doing such a fabulous job of making a show of themselves? McEwan manages to do so with great style and comic panache...McEwan elaborates this great scheme in prose so finely wrought that the plan seems to have some genuine gravity. And this in turn makes it very funny. He cannot hope to laugh the terrible reality of Brexit out of existence, but McEwan’s comic parable at least provides some relief from a political farce that has long gone beyond a joke." [4]
Erik Martiny also praises the novel in The London Magazine , "With politics the main focus of his attention, McEwan gives it all the pizzazz he possesses and with hilarious results. His mastery of free indirect speech allows you to enter the cockroach’s mind in startlingly funny ways." and "a refreshing and imaginative contribution to the genre of magic realism." [5]
Dwight Garner has the opposite view, writing in The New York Times : "The Cockroach is so toothless and wan that it may drive his readers away in long apocalyptic caravans. The young McEwan, the author of blacker-than-black little novels, the man who acquired the nickname “Ian Macabre,” would rather have gnawed off his own fingers than written it. At dark political and social moments, we need better, rougher magic than this...Once McEwan has established his premise, however, The Cockroach stalls. It devolves into self-satisfied, fish-in-barrel commentary about topics like Twitter and the tabloid press...The idea of writing The Cockroach probably seemed, in the shower one morning, like a good one. Later, after coffee, it might have occurred to McEwan that suggesting your opponents are cockroaches might be to drop down to their carpet level. [6]
Robert Shrimsley writing in Financial Times explains "By the end of this short, occasionally elegant and no doubt cathartic fictional essay, McEwan has inadvertently given readers a fresh insight into the arrogance and contempt that liberal society feels towards those who have dared to defy it by voting for Brexit. For all the flourishes one would expect from a novelist of McEwan’s brilliance, this falls way short of his usual standard...This is the McEwan we expect; playful, inventive and clever. The descriptions of physical transformation are unsurprisingly excellent though he is not the first author to riff on Kafka’s classic. But as soon as he returns to the pure politics, the intelligence gives way to unfiltered and uninquisitive rage. What a shame. A cold-headed, forensic McEwan on Brexit would have been worth reading. [7]
A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from Being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick, commonly referred to as A Modest Proposal, is a Juvenalian satirical essay written and published anonymously by Anglo-Irish writer and clergyman Jonathan Swift in 1729. The essay suggests that poor people in Ireland could ease their economic troubles by selling their children as food to the elite. Swift's use of satirical hyperbole was intended to mock hostile attitudes towards the poor and anti-Catholicism among the Protestant Ascendancy as well as the Dublin Castle administration's policies in general. In English writing, the phrase "a modest proposal" is now conventionally an allusion to this style of straight-faced satire.
The Metamorphosis, also translated as The Transformation, is a novella by Franz Kafka published in 1915. One of Kafka's best-known works, The Metamorphosis tells the story of salesman Gregor Samsa, who wakes one morning to find himself inexplicably transformed into a huge insect and struggles to adjust to this condition. The novella has been widely discussed among literary critics, who have offered varied interpretations. In popular culture and adaptations of the novella, the insect is commonly depicted as a cockroach.
William Woodard Self is an English writer, journalist, political commentator and broadcaster. He has written 11 novels, five collections of shorter fiction, three novellas and nine collections of non-fiction writing. Self is currently Professor of Modern Thought at Brunel University London, where he teaches psychogeography.
Absurdist fiction is a genre of novels, plays, poems, films, or other media that focuses on the experiences of characters in situations where they cannot find any inherent purpose in life, most often represented by ultimately meaningless actions and events that call into question the certainty of existential concepts such as truth or value.
Ian David Hislop is a British journalist, satirist, and television personality. He is the editor of the satirical magazine Private Eye, a position he has held since 1986. He has appeared on numerous radio and television programmes and has been a team captain on the BBC satirical quiz show Have I Got News for You since its inception in 1990. Hislop has been involved in numerous legal battles, as Private Eye has often been sued for libel over the years. Despite these challenges, Hislop has remained a key figure in British satire and journalism.
Dave Eggers is an American writer, editor, and publisher. He wrote the 2000 best-selling memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Eggers is also the founder of Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, a literary journal; a co-founder of the literacy project 826 Valencia, co-founder of The Hawkins Project, and the human rights nonprofit Voice of Witness; and the founder of ScholarMatch, a program that matches donors with students needing funds for college tuition. His writing has appeared in several magazines, including The New Yorker, Esquire, and The New York Times Magazine.
Ian Russell McEwan is a British novelist and screenwriter. In 2008, The Times featured him on its list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945" and The Daily Telegraph ranked him number 19 in its list of the "100 most powerful people in British culture".
The Children Act is a novel by the English writer Ian McEwan. It was published on 2 September 2014. The title is a reference to the Children Act 1989, a UK Act of Parliament. The book has been compared to Charles Dickens's Bleak House, with its similar settings, and opening lines.
First Love, Last Rites is a collection of short stories by Ian McEwan. It was first published in 1975 by Jonathan Cape, with cover designed by Bill Botten, and re-issued in 1997 by Vintage.
Atonement is a 2001 British metafictional novel written by Ian McEwan. Set in three time periods, 1935 England, Second World War England and France, and present-day England, it covers an upper-class girl's half-innocent mistake that ruins lives, her adulthood in the shadow of that mistake, and a reflection on the nature of writing.
A Bucket of Blood is a 1959 American comedy horror film directed by Roger Corman. It starred Dick Miller and was set in the West Coast beatnik culture of the late 1950s. The film, produced on a $50,000 budget, was shot in five days and shares many of the low-budget filmmaking aesthetics commonly associated with Corman's work. Written by Charles B. Griffith, the film is a dark comic satire about a dimwitted, impressionable young busboy at a Bohemian café who is acclaimed as a brilliant sculptor when he accidentally kills his landlady's cat and covers its body in clay to hide the evidence. When he is pressured to create similar work, he becomes a serial murderer.
In Between the Sheets (1978) is the second collection of short stories by British writer Ian McEwan.
On Chesil Beach is a 2007 novella by the British writer Ian McEwan. It was selected for the 2007 Booker Prize shortlist.
The Uncommon Reader is a novella by Alan Bennett. After appearing first in the London Review of Books, Vol. 29, No. 5, it was published later the same year in book form by Faber & Faber and Profile Books.
Solar is a novel by author Ian McEwan, first published on 18 March 2010 by Jonathan Cape, an imprint of Random House. It is a satire about a jaded Nobel-winning physicist whose dysfunctional personal life and cynical ambition see him pursuing a solar-energy based solution for climate change.
Sweet Tooth is a novel by the English writer Ian McEwan, published on 21 August 2012. It deals with the experiences of its protagonist, Serena Frome, during the early 1970s. After graduating from Cambridge she is recruited by MI5, and becomes involved in a covert programme to combat communism by infiltrating the intellectual world. When she becomes romantically involved with her mark, complications ensue.
Nutshell is the 14th novel by English author and screenwriter Ian McEwan published in 2016. It alludes to William Shakespeare’s Hamlet and re-imagines the plot from the perspective of an eight-month-old unborn foetus in London in 2015.
The Bible and humor is a topic of Biblical criticism concerned with the question of whether parts of the Bible were intended to convey humor in any style. Historically, this topic has not received much attention, but modern scholars generally agree that humor can be found in biblical texts.
The Metamorphosis is a novella by Franz Kafka published in 1915. One of Kafka's best-known works, The Metamorphosis tells the story of salesman Gregor Samsa, who wakes one morning to find himself inexplicably transformed into a huge insect and struggles to adjust to his new condition. The novella has been recreated, referenced, or parodied in various popular culture media.
BorderIrish or @BorderIrish was the pseudonym of an anonymous satirical author, resident on the island of Ireland, who from 2018 to 2020 wrote in the first person about being the 97-year-old 499 km (310 mi) Irish border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, both on Twitter as @BorderIrish and in print with I Am the Border, So I Am (2019); and in particular on the implications of Brexit on the Irish land border.