As analogies go, you’d have to say that Reversalism-Brexit, or Reversalist-Brexiteer, is pretty far-fetched even once you factor in the licence extended by terms like “absurdist” and “Swiftian”. Meanwhile the plebiscite whose result the government must either institute or defy concerns a piece of arcane economic theorising with little resemblance to the tariff-related expenses and border complications of a no-deal scenario. After the initial appalling wake-up, the “Metamorphosis” framework yields nothing except for the idea of a human consciousness having access to a group mind, and even this wanes as Jim loses contact with “the boundless resource of the oceanic pheromonal”. Science and Technical Research and Developmentīut as you move through the book, it becomes less clear what Jim’s journey really has to do with either Kafka or Brexit.Infrastructure Management - Transport, Utilities.Information Services, Statistics, Records, Archives.Information and Communications Technology.HR, Training and Organisational Development.Health - Medical and Nursing Management.Facility / Grounds Management and Maintenance.But he soon realises that he understands concepts such as “Wales”. Initially Jim seems to be merely a cockroach in human form and retains his erstwhile access to the collective “pheromonal unconscious”. At some point he parted company with his customary self and came “under the influence of a greater, guiding force” – “the collective spirit”. The previous night Jim had left his home, sticking as ever to the gutters. The only remnant of his old brown shell is his slightly gingery hair. His head is large, and his eyes can move. Because he no longer has a compound eye, everything appears “oppressively colourful”. In his mouth “a slab of slippery meat lay squat and wet”. As a writer, McEwan is nothing if not methodical, and he dutifully logs the relevant transformations. In the opening pages, an insect resident in the Palace of Westminster, Jim Sams, wakes up to finds that he has become prime minister. It even ends up generating one or two potent ideas, though admittedly not about populism or Europe. Though intended as a jeu d’esprit – if an exercise in hand-wringing can truly lay claim to that status – The Cockroach offers a more commanding display of its author’s strengths than Salman Rushdie’s similarly peeved though more outwardly hard-working Cervantes update, Quichotte. Ian McEwan’s new novella, written at a clip and published in time for the latest Brexit deadline, starts by inverting the set-up of Kafka’s story “The Metamorphosis”, and then moves into the terrain of very narrowly topical satire: defiant parliament, recumbent cabinet, doltish US president, and so on.

Kafka the cockroach