The Cockroach – Ian McEwan

Rating: 2.5 stars

I waited to get this book for about half a year, and when I finally got through the library holds, it came the same day as Stoner. “Oh no, I only have three weeks and a bunch of work to do, how will I ever get through both of them?” The answer is that The Cockroach is about a hundred pages long.

I say about because that’s how it came out with the printing, but it really, really would be less if they used any normal font and margins. The book is probably around twenty thousand words long, so I have a hard time swallowing it for eleven dollars (now discounted to even less). There are a lot of indie books that will get you way more words for a lower price. Also there are probably a bunch of regular books. I’m complaining about this, not because I really care about page counts, but because I felt disappointed. A good story can be ten thousand, a hundred or a million words.

Okay, now I’m going to talk about the book. As I’ve talked about on Down South Boulder Road, I despise anything creative attempting to be the whatever of this generation. The 1984 of this generation, the Frankenstein, etc. It doesn’t say anything about them, especially because all of those books were written in a specific context. All art (and so to a lesser degree all creative output, good and bad) is political, and I don’t just mean that in a ‘who are you voting for?’ sense. It’s about history. No two books will ever be equal except by when they’re written.

I say all of this because this book wants to be the modern version of The Metamorphosis. No, not The Metamorphoses, you weird Ovid lover, but Kafka’s book. So I’m going to explain the plot because I have no respect for the book. If you care about spoilers or anything, stop reading. Also don’t read the back of the book because it tells you basically the whole story.

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

There are basically three stories: 1. some people are giant, sentient, heartless cockroaches, 2. some political hijinks and 3. Brexit.

1. So this is two actual plots, but the Kafka connection is so tenuous, namely that Gregor Samsa is a likable individual that we’re supposed to sympathize with, and Jim Sams is absolutely not, so I’m not going to deal with that at all. This is basically a running joke and more or less calls not-Trump a heartless insect. There isn’t much to interact with here. Not that I would expect it in such a short book (nor would I expect three plots to be happening in it either)
2. The political hijinks are the closest thing you’ll get to a plot in this book. It’s mostly very cynical and pushes, at times, heavily on the ‘these are heartless insects’ thing.
3. It’s not Brexit! Who told you that? It’s just an allegory about how stupid and backwards the imminent British economic change (there’s nothing about the scientific or cultural impacts) will be. I mean, it kinda straw mans the whole thing, which doesn’t really need it. It’s already pretty ridiculous, at least the reasoning for it.

That’s about all of the book. Don’t expect a coherent narrative or a good answer for “why not just write about how you hate Brexit?”, “why would you invoke Kafka when it seems like you haven’t read The Metamorphosis or understood its point?”

Note: I’m not saying the author hasn’t read The Metamorphosis. I’m just saying it really reads like he just name-dropped it. The writing isn’t particularly adept. I read a decent amount of it out loud to my 5-month-old because I was taking care of him, and I had to read a few sentences a few times to get it all clearly out of my mouth. If you’re wondering, that shouldn’t happen almost ever. A few times, whatever, but not even close to a majority of sentences should be like that. I was ready to admit it’s a thing about the difference between American and British English, but I got less convinced of that over the course of the book. There were enough sentences that were well constructed to make me question it.

I guess I’m doing this now because I feel compelled to say it: I wouldn’t recommend you get this book (novella, really), and I have low standards. You can find my name in a lot of bathrooms.