Thursday 14 November 2019

The Cockroach by Ian McEwan



"A novella for our times"

'That morning, Jim Sams, clever but by no means profound, woke from uneasy dreams to find himself transformed into a gigantic creature'

The Cockroach takes Kafka's Metamorphosis as the starting point for a novel about a man who turns into cockroach, only in McEwan's world this man is the Prime Minister. With a country bitterly divided by an existential decision, in this case it's the economic theory of Reversalism, a dysfunctional government struggles to find any semblance of a solution.

If this all sounds familiar you'll enjoy McEwan's intelligent satire on Britain in 2019. For literary fans the Kafka adaptation is a bit of a misnomer as there is little beyond the opening scene. 

So contemporary is this novella that the publishers must have literally been stacking the shelves as the ink dried. 3⭐️

The Cockroach by Ian McEwan published by Vintage 112 pages

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