The Cockroach

So Ian McEwan's last novel, Machines like me, was not my favourite. In fact, it may have been his worst novel ever. And it left me despairing that he may have lost his touch, something I'd apparently feared before.
I need not have worried, for just six months later I wandered around the bookshop and ran into The Cockroach, a small novella (less than 100 pages) about Jim Sams waking up and "finding himself transformed into a gigantic creature". I've never read The Metamorphosis, but even I know enough to recognise that reference. In this story, it is the cockroach that is transformed into the human, into the PM of the United Kingdom, to be exact. The UK is undergoing political upheaval as the Reversalist Conservatives want to push through a big economic change, which the Clockwise Labour party wants to forestall. Sounds familiar? What if I tell you the Labour leader is actually a Reversalist himself? Or what about the American president Tupper, busy communicating by Twitter and spending time on his many golf courses?
Yup, this is a political satire, and a good one at that. Brexit is never mentioned, the whole story is purely fictional, and "resemblance to any cockroach, living or dead, is purely coincidental". But between the lines there is of course the absurd reality that the UK is now living through. I don't know that Ian McEwan has written a satire before, but this one is really well done. And it combines his dry, witty humour with his beautiful, flowing language, even when he is verbally slaughtering political opponents.
I raced through the book in about two hours and it left me both good for having read a great McEwan story and sad because the craziness it describes is actually taking place across the pond. But in the end, it is more words by my favourite author, and I'm always happy to have those.