McEwan Goes Satirical

Our greatest living writer, Ian McEwan, is rightly famed for his legendary sense of humour and his wholly original and profound take on contemporary politics, so naturally one can hardly wait to read his new 'satirical novella' about Brexit (he's against it, I was startled to learn). It's called The Cockroach, and its big idea is a reversal of Kafka's Metamorphosis: a cockroach wakes up one morning and finds that he's been transformed into – wait for it... – the Prime Minister of pre-Brexit Britain (a 'modern Pericles', no less – who could he be thinking of?)! Only it's not Brexit that's dividing the country but the deep division between Reversalists and Clockwisers. Reversalists believe in a transparently absurd economic theory in which employees pay employers, retailers pay people to take stuff away, cops hand speeding motorists £50, etc – and, guess what, they've won a referendum! What to do?
Needless to say, this great publishing event earned McEwan an admiring interview on the Today programme. Happily I missed most of it, but heard the great man mocking the notion of sovereignty, which he clearly did not understand. No surprise there.