The Cockroach, by Ian McEwan, 2019

The Cockroach runs to less than 100 pages, and was obviously written quickly, in a state of intense anger. It takes as a starting point Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis and cleverly turns it on its head – a cockroach is turned into a human being. At first he finds the clumsy nature of the body he has acquired, with its floppy limbs and internal skeleton hard to cope with. In his mouth “a slab of slippery meat lay squat and wet”. Because he no longer has compound eyes, everything appears “oppressively colourful”. His head is large, and his eyes can move. His skeleton is covered in flesh. Slowly it is revealed that this isn’t any random human that he has been turned into, but the Prime Minister, Jim Sams, who bears a profoundly close similarity to the man who is at the time of writing, but hopefully not much longer, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

Kafka is fairly quickly left behind, as the new Prime Minister launches a plan to implement an economic policy so insane that only a thinly disguised President Trump can support it. The UK is driven through the looking glass into a world in which up is down, lies are truth, Parliament is the enemy of democracy, and the constitution is there to be ignored. McEwan’s solution to how Brexit could be forced through Parliament even though the Government doesn’t have a majority was inspired. For months we were told that Johnson and Cummings had a cunning plan which only four or five people had been told about, but that would see Brexit delivered on 31st October. That was all horseshit, but McEwan could have worked it for them it he had been so inclined. I bet they are kicking themselves! Job done, the cockroaches return to their previous form, but not before one is trodden on, thereby providing a tasty snack for his partners in crime.

Reviewers have consistently compared this novella to the work of Jonathan Swift, which is extraordinarily high praise indeed. Swift’s work often seems driven by anger, and here McEwan rages at the stupidity of Brexit (without mentioning it) as a massive act of national self harm which can only be rationally explained by metaphor. There are of course many economic and political explanations for the forces that led to the Brexit vote (and Trump’s election) but you won’t find any analysis of those forces here. Instead this is a cathartic rage against the forces of darkness threatening our country, forces that don’t read novels and don’t really care for reading anything else much either.

McEwan’s website helpfully summarises his motivations in The Cockroach, although we could probably have worked these out for ourselves – nevertheless the clarity is useful:

‘As the nation tears itself apart, constitutional norms are set aside, parliament is closed down so that the government cannot be challenged at a crucial time and ministers lie about it shamelessly in the old Soviet style, and when many Brexiters in high places seem to crave the economic catastrophe of a no deal, and English national extremists are attacking the police in Parliament Square, a writer is bound to ask what he or she can do. There’s only one answer: write. The Cockroach is a political satire in an old tradition. Mockery might be a therapeutic response, though it’s hardly a solution. But a reckless, self-harming, ugly and alien spirit has entered the minds of certain politicians and newspaper proprietors. They lie to their supporters. They express contempt for judges and the rule and norms of law. They seem to want to achieve their ends by means of chaos. What’s got into them? A cockroach or two, I suspect.’

Reviewers struggled to appreciate this novel, despite it being a very simple parable and despite McEwan’s even simpler translation above. The New Statesman’s judgment was that:

“If the book cannot be considered any kind of addition to the oeuvre, it is at the very least a coda to more substantive ventures, and another clue in the ongoing quest to understand what really matters to McEwan”

This misses the point spectacularly. Literature is not a guessing game where the novelist,  slowly reveals text by text clues to “what matters” to him or her. If you manage to read The Cockroach without working out within a few pages that McEwan is angry as hell with the state of the United Kingdom in 2019 then all the clues in the world aren’t going to help you divine what matters to him. 

The Guardian had reservations about McEwan’s use of cockroaches as an image for the Cabinet:

“Comparing one’s political opponents to cockroaches is a toxic metaphor with a nasty political history and it is hard to read McEwan’s novella without a degree of discomfort.”

The Spectator, formerly edited by the Cockroach in chief himself, had similar reservations:

“For many of us, it will never be at all OK to describe democratically elected politicians as ‘cockroaches’. It was the word by which the génocidaires in Rwanda called their adherents to action”

This is the same Spectator that ran an article in 2015 headed “She’s wrong but Katie Hopkins has a right to call migrants cockroaches”. Satire may be on the critical list, but irony is not dead!

Mostly Harmless, by Douglas Adams, 1992

There’s an obvious, I might even say lazy, reading of Mostly Harmless that goes something like this:

It is well known that Adams struggled with writing these novels. His lack of interest in the process is apparent in the steady decline in quality across the series, ending with this novel in which the plot is confused, the multiverse theory is wheeled out several times to explain away any inconvenient plot holes, and the ending is the author slamming the door on any further possible sequels. (In fact this novel was published posthumously, so that wasn’t really an issue as it turned out!) The dark and frankly depressing tone of the novel is largely a feature of Adams’s melancholy mood during the time he wrote it.

And of course much of that is true. The question is not whether this is a fair summary of the novel but whether there is something more interesting to be said about it?

Mostly Harmless, the fifth book in the “increasingly inaccurately named Hitchhikers’ Trilogy” derives its title from a joke earlier in the series, when Arthur Dent discovers that the entry for Earth in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy representing 15 years’ worth of research by Ford Prefect, consists of the word “Harmless”, which is later updated to“Mostly harmless”.

Arthur Dent, the one constant throughout the series, loses the love of his life, his girlfriend Fenchurch, when she disappears into an alternative time stream during a hyperspace jump. An understandably depressed Arthur wanders the galaxy, eventually ending up stranded in yet another lonely planet, where he decides to become a sandwich maker, as one does. In a parallel storyline, Ford steals a new and as yet-unpublished version of the Hitchhiker’s Guide as an act of rebellion against the guide’s new owners. In a third strand Tricia MacMillan is tortured by the thought of what her life might have turned out to be if she had left with the alien she once met at a party who invited her to travel the galaxy with him. Finally a Trillian from a separate timeline conceives a child, Random Dent, using donated sperm from Arthur.

Now if you step back a minute there’s no doubt that this as a plot outline shows some promise. Admittedly there is a considerable amount of repetition from previous novels – being stranded on a lonely planet is pretty much where we started after all (with Ford on earth). The satire is a bit heavy-handed, and the multiverse idea isn’t exactly original. But it’s a good start nonetheless. Tricia/Trillian finally gets some serious page time being more than just arm-candy for Zaphod, and the idea of the unintended consequences of over-enthusiastic sperm-donation coming back to haunt the donor is worth pursuing. So I think what I am trying to argue is that there is a good novel here struggling to get out, but not quite making it. The re-imagining of the guide as a sinister force that can navigate through time and space, inhabiting all possible universes at the same time, takes the quite benign original concept of the guide – not much more than a book after all – and turns it into a destroyer of worlds. The ending, with Ford laughing wildly at the absurdity of the universe, and Arthur finally experiencing a “tremendous feeling of peace”, feels like an entirely fitting way of Adams’s saying goodbye to his characters. 

 

Mostly harmless is undeniably bleak at times. Its plotlines are often left dangling – I would really like to know what happened to Fenchurch, Zaphod and Trillian for example. But (and I am very conscious I have written this many times before, of other writers and possibly of Adams as well) a badly constructed, bleak, and confused novel by Douglas Adams is still a thing of great joy. With more time this might have been a fitting finale to the series.

 

So long, and thanks for all the fish, by Douglas Adams, 1984

It will not take most readers long to work out that So Long and Thanks for All the Fish, the fourth book in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy, is a very different type of novel from its predecessors. These were all (more or less) novelisations of other iterations of the story, mainly the radio series in which Hitchhiker first appeared. Fast paced and fizzing with ideas, these earlier novels can be consumed in one sitting. So long, on the other hand, is a much more reflexive novel. Adams tries to capture some of the spirit of Hitchhiker etc, but eventually settles down to a much more traditional, earth -bound romance. 

At the end of Book 3 in the series, Life, the Universe and Everything, Arthur Dent, Adams’s eternal everyman, and his alien friend Ford Prefect were stranded on earth millenia before the present day. Things have now obviously moved on, because Arthur and Ford are no longer together. This is really Arthur’s novel, and Ford fades into the background playing only a minor role towards the end.  Having hitchhiked across the galaxy, Arthur is dropped back on Earth, even though the planet was. as you will recall, destroyed by the Vogons to make way for a hyper-space bypass. Arthur is surprisingly calm about this, and continues to do what he knows best – hitchhike, restlessly trying to understand what has happened to restore the earth, and where all the dolphins have gone? He has a hunch the two things are connected.

On his travels he catches a lift with a man named Russell and his sister Fenchurch. Fenchurch is withdrawn and uncommunicative, and Russell hints that she is mentally unwell. It slowly becomes clear that Fenchurch’s condition is connected to the demolition of the Earth and its subsequent reappearance, which the rest of the population avoids thinking about by claiming it was mass hysteria. Arthur is fascinated by Fenchurch, partly because he is strongly attracted to her, but also because he suspects that she is one of very few people left on earth who might be able to understand what he has experienced.

As the novel unfolds their paths keep crossing and uncrossing. Arthur finds Fenchurch hitchhiking, gives her a lift, but on parting manages to lose her phone number. He then miraculously rediscovers her by searching for the cave he lived in on prehistoric Earth – her flat is on the same spot on this quasi-Earth. There is something strange about Fenchurch, and it is only when Arthur finally works it out that they are able to properly connect with one another. It transpires that Fenchurch was the woman mentioned in passing in the opening chapter of the previous novel who, moments before the earth’s demolition, had stumbled across the answer to life, the universe and everything. Someone who in the previous novel was just a throw-away gag becomes here a central character. The destruction of the earth had interrupted her epiphany, and Fenchurch is now left with a nagging sensation that a tantalising breakthrough is just out of reach – and the thought is making her ill.

Eventually, they are reunited with Ford Prefect, and they set off once again across the universe to visit the planet where God’s Final Message to His Creation is written, in the hope that it might give them some peace. On the way they encounter Marvin, the paranoid android, still as misanthropic as ever, but now some 37 times older than the known age of the universe and on his last circuits.

Neil Gaiman’s introduction reveals some of the pain Adams went through in composing So Long, but if you didn’t know it would probably still be apparent. At one point for example he retells in detail an urban legend (the one about the man sitting opposite you in a cafe who helps himself to your biscuits). It’s exquisitely told, but it’s padding nonetheless. (There was a point to this story, but it has temporarily escaped the chronicler’s mind.) Gaiman reveals that Adams’ editor moved in with him in a vain attempt to ensure that the book was completed to deadline. This might have led to some of the unevenness of tone of the novel, a feeling that every word was an effort and that the end comes as much to a relief as Adams as it did to Marvin. But a bad book by a genius can’t but help but be a work of genius, even if it is flawed. There are many moment to savour in So Long, not least the title which like many of Adams’s phrases has entered the general lexicon. This is not Adams at his best or his most inventive, and the jokes are a little dated (“There is a feeling which persists in England that making a sandwich interesting, attractive or in any way pleasant to eat is something sinful that only foreigners do.”) but it must still be treasured as part of the wider contribution he made to our culture.

 

Adolf Hitler, my part in his downfall, by Spike Milligan, 1971

If this blog is anything, it is at heart a reading diary, a record of the books I read and my thoughts about them. What I read is not always going to be improving or classic literature – far from it – and it follows that from time to time I will review books that would not normally feature in a book blog. But having said all that I am not in the slightest embarrassed to be re-reading Spike Milligan’s inspired Adolf Hitler, my part in his downfall once again. It seems the perfect book for these times, a quiet voice of sanity amongst the madness that is the world of today.

My Part is the first volume of Spike’s war memoirs, spanning the period from the declaration of war to when he landed in Algeria as a part of the Allied invasion of Africa. It is the first of what was eventually to be seven volumes of reminiscences covering his war service and the years immediately after when he was trying to resume his life and break into showbiz. The diary format used captures the immediacy of the experience of being called up to fight for one’s country, the strange combination of dread and adventure that many young people must have felt. The memories of ridiculous, outrageous adventures – Milligan obviously retained a strong sense of silliness throughout his life – and tragedy (“There were the deaths of some of my friends, and therefore, no matter how funny I tried to make this book, that will always be at the back of my mind”) combine to give the novel its unique, immensely touching tone. 

The novel opens with Spike receiving a “cunningly worded invitation to partake in World War II“. Given “a train ticket and a picture of Hitler reading “This is your enemy”‘ he sets off for war – or more specifically Bexhill-on-Sea, where he begins what seems an extraordinarily long period of training in the artillery. Training largely serves as a background to his musical interests – playing in a jazz band, and chasing girls. After more than two years of training, drinking, music and girls, all overlaid with large amounts of silliness as Spike hones his comedic skills in preparation for the career that was to follow, the inevitable order to travel overseas arrives. In January 1943 the regiment finally embarked for North Africa. Milligan describes the sunrise:

...there is no light so full of hope as the dawn; amber, resin, copper lake, brass green. One by one, they shed themselves until the sun rose golden in a white sky…I closed my eyes and turned my face to the sun. I fell down a hatchway. (p 140)

There are several moments of poetic writing such as this, always undercut by the punchline. It is here, as the reality of war begins to dawn on the very young men in Spike’s regiment, that he ends the volume,

I would hazard a guess that Milligan partly wrote these memoirs as a trip down memory lane, a way of capturing the memories before they faded too much, and partly as a convenient source of revenue – the books have always sold well, and this one was also turned into a film. It’s a curious mix of seriousness and silliness, but it works, and Milligan’s wit and humanity shines through. He’s certainly not made the hero of his own book – there are far too many confessions for that – but the reader can understand why Milligan got off so lightly so often for his misbehaviour and insubordination.