Kafka wrote a novella, The Metamorphosis, about a man who finds himself transformed into a beetle. Now Ian McEwan has written one about a beetle that is transformed into a man. He’s not the first writer to have thought of doing this, but he might be the first one who thought it was a good idea. Readers will remember that in Randall Jarrell’s classic comedy of a creative writing faculty, Pictures from an Institution, the heroine has a student called Sylvia Moomaw (‘I had remembered her name but had forgotten her’). One day, she hands in a story ‘about a bug that turns into a man…it’s influenced by Kafka’. The hero reads it (‘There was a part where the man said “Could I have ever really been a bug?”’) and is moved to a sad, brutal reflection about his pupil:
Once upon a time there was a princess who laid down on seven mattresses, and slept like a baby all night through, and when she woke up in the morning she said I dreamed there was something under my mattress and they looked and there was a horse.
It’s quite an apt observation to recall, when presented with a satirical novella about Brexit. Why waste your energy on Dominic Raab when there’s a Guy Verhofstadt, a grinning goody-goody like Sabine Weyand, a Juncker staggering with post prandial sciatica, to be skewered? This cabinet goes to Bayreuth, writes civilised books about history and refers to classical civilisation in passing. Are the satirist’s best endeavours to be spent ridiculing them as insect-brains? Or might we recommend a glance at some occupants of the benches opposite?
One day a cockroach wakes up to find that he has been transformed into a man. His name is Jim Sams, and he is the prime minister.
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