I an McEwan’s last book, 2019’s The Cockroach, was a petty-hearted Brexit fable and Kafka spoof. Instead of a man waking in the body of a bug, a bug wakes in the body of the British prime minister. Ensconced at No 10, the insect PM sets about creating a squalid paradise for his fellow critters – a septic isle. It’s not hard to reduce the UK to filth and ruin: just give the idiot humans exactly what they want.
The Cockroach was less a satire than a sneer, a book that set out to entrench rather
