The Cockroach

Written by Ian McEwan

Narrated by Bill Nighy

A brilliant, of-the-moment political satire like no other: here is Ian McEwan's Brexit-era take on Kafka's Metamorphosis, centered on a cockroach transformed into the prime minister of England. An Anchor Original. That morning, Jim Sams, clever but by no means profound, woke from uneasy dreams to find himself transformed into a giant creature. Jim Sams has undergone a metamorphosis. In his previous life he was ignored or loathed, but in his new incarnation he is the most powerful man in Britain--and it is his mission to carry out the will of the people. Nothing must get in his way; not the opposition, nor the dissenters within his own party. Not even the rules of parliamentary democracy. In this bitingly funny Kafkaesque satire, Ian McEwan engages with scabrous humor a very recognizable political world and turns it on its head.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Recorded Books, Inc.
• Release date: Oct 8, 2019
• ISBN: 9781980077138

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan (Aldershot, Reino Unido, 1948) se licenció en Literatura Inglesa en la Universidad de Sussex y es uno de los miembros más destacados de su muy brillante generación. En Anagrama se han publicado sus dos libros de relatos, Primer amor, últimos ritos (Premio Somerset Maugham) y Entre las sábanas, las novelas El placer del viajero, Niños en el tiempo (Premio Whitbread y Premio Fémina), El inocente, Los perros negros, Amor perdurable, Amsterdam (Premio Booker), Expiación (que ha obtenido, entre otros premios, el WH Smith Literary Award, el People’s Booker y el Commonwealth Eurasia), Sábado (Premio James Tait Black), En las nubes, Chesil Beach (National Book Award), Solar (Premio Wodehouse), Operación Dulce, La ley del menor, Cáscara de nuez, Máquinas como yo, La cucaracha y Lecciones y el breve ensayo El espacio de la imaginación. McEwan ha sido galardonado con el Premio Shakespeare. Foto © Maria Teresa Slanzi.

Reviews for The Cockroach

[bsiemens_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I feel some ambivalence in saying that I enjoyed this book, which is what my 4-star rating usually means. The author has done a masterful job at presenting a clear anti-hero; there is very little to like about the main character. And he is surrounded by conflicted, pitiable characters. I had read more than half of the book before I caught a thread that felt interesting; the story picked up when there was only a quarter of the book left. I was tempted throughout to abandon it but was compelled in hopes of some understanding. I'm glad I stuck it out.

[lynnb_64 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Cockroach tells the story of an immigrant in Montreal. He is trying to get by in his new country, leaving behind a tragic family situation in his homeland. Our hero deals with being on welfare, having a low-paid, menial job, and commiting petty crimes. He gets by, in part, by imagining himself to be a cockroach....an often hated, frequently ignored creature with an exceptional ability to survive apocalypse.Well written, fast-moving, this novel provides us with a glimpse of the lives of newcomers and how they struggle to fit in, to come to terms with their past lives, to find meaning in thier new lives.

[musecure · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

At times unsettling, comedic, hopeful and desperate. Interesting glimpse into immigrant life in Montreal and into mind of a man who having survived a violent, war-torn childhood takes refuge in his imaginative transformation into a cockroach. The only creature guaranteed to survive when humanity is wiped out.

[scribblekey · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Well, my rating of two stars looks quite low, but given the descriptions that Goodreads provides, I was unable to justify 3 stars ("I liked it"). Unfortunately, it was merely - in my opinion - OK. Goodreads suggests two stars for "it was ok", so that's what I gave. I don't know why I feel it so necessary to defend my rating, but I've gotten a lot of flak in the past over what people see as low ratings for books that they like (hello, "The Luminaries"!). Oh well. That's what ratings are for. If everybody gave out 5 stars, the site would be useless.

Anyway, now for the review. I was really hoping to like this book, especially after I read (and fell in love with) "Annabel" by Kathleen Winter. These are both Canada Reads 2014 finalists (I've just got three more to go!). Unfortunately, Cockroach just wasn't my kind of book. I didn't care for the characters. Sure, the main character was a delusional criminal, but I am not referring to his morality. The character just didn't seem REAL. I didn't care about anybody because they didn't seem human. The whole book is written in a style that I can't quite describe... it's not the brain-numbing, pseudo-intellectual, artsy style that I hated in The Luminaries. I felt that I was reading the work of a poet. The author was more interested in making his prose seem worthy of an award, not making a universe that actually existed, with living, breathing, dynamic characters. I recognized some of the streets and locations in the book (who doesn't love Montreal?), but that was the only dose of realism that I found.

Sorry, Rawi and lovers of the Cockroach, I just couldn't care about any of this book. It wasn't terrible, but it just wasn't for me.

[litfan_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

"Cockroach" weaves themes of the meaning of being human, sanity, sex, and revenge, into 300 short pages, while also providing a scathing indictment of the way "civilized" society handles immigration. The novel's protagonist, himself an immigrant, struggles to survive in a world that clearly separates the haves from the have nots. At some points he confuses himself with one of the cockroaches that inhabit his apartment; the cockroach metaphor recurs throughout the novel in subtle, effective ways.The novel is dark but steeped with humanity; the author shows us the stories of various characters who have immigrated to Canada and the emotional scars that they carry. He highlights the lives and tales of those who are often forgotten and marginalized due to their status. The writing is rich and smooth, and builds up to a suspenseful, memorable finale. Highly recommended.

[siafl · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Something in the book tells me that I really like it, particularly Hage's writing. His sentences and lines quite often make me go, "That's it! There's no better way of pitting it." Something else in the book tells me that I dislike some of the images that he puts in my head: that same pair of socks. (Although, those new socks and the new pair of boots, good call, Rawi!) I think some of the smells that Hage manages to create in my head I dislike as well. But that's why it's titled the way it is.For the majority of the novel I disliked the existence of the character Genevieve, as I was always anticipating something life-changing popping out of her and it never came. Note that this is not to say that I disliked the character. I just didn't see the point of why we needed to always go back to her. Then at the beginning of the final chapter I almost felt that we were going to read about her. At that point I thought that it wasn't time for that story, and if I started to find out about her I would really hate her existence. Luckily it never happened. We marched out of her office and she remained an essential but not helpful shrink. For that, then, I told myself I that I liked the book, because I am the type of reader to seek an ending that works logically. Not that it has to end well, it just has to fit, and for me Hage, and I base this on having read his other novel, DeNiro's Game, is the fitting-ending sort of writer.A great read.

[loosha_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I have such mixed feelings about this book. Read the other two long reviews to get a taste for it. It is a powerful story that will remain with me, the characters are unique and largely unforgettable. but...it made me wince with the overexhuberant use of the descriptive phrase, which I know I know, defines the psychotic nature of the protagonist...Isn't this too much though? She lived in a rich neighbourhood with shop windows displaying expensive clothing and restaurants that echoed with the sounds of expensive utensils, utensils that dug swiftly into livers and ribs and swept senusally above the surface of yellow butter the colour of a September moon, a cold field of hay, the tint of a temple's stained glass, of brass lamps and altars, of beer jars, wet and full beneath wooden handles....

[shelfmonkey · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Seeing as immigration is an integral element of the Canadian landscape, it should come as no surprise that authors might seek to dip into this cultural stew for dramatic purposes. Very few, however, would likely seek to add the phantasmagorical and hallucinatory elements that Rawi Hage’s novel Cockroach brings to the recipe.The Canadian author arose seemingly from out of nowhere in 2006 when his debut novel De Niro’s Game was rescued from the obscurity of the slush pile at House of Anansi Press. The novel was immediately deluged with plaudits and awards, culminating in his recent win of the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the largest English literary prize on the planet.No one could blame Hage for any perceived degree of tentativeness in his approach to his sophomore novel. Yet while it contains many of the same themes as his first, Cockroach proves that Hage is not content to rest on his laurels.Leaving behind Game’s war-blighted Lebanon, Cockroach sets itself in the more overtly familiar surroundings of Montreal. But while the country may be considerably dissimilar, Hage continues his penchant for bleak poetic atmosphere, transforming the bustling metropolis into an alien topography of menial jobs, mysterious accents, insect infestations, and class hostilities.Cockroach is first and foremost a character study of a stranger in a strange land. A very strange stranger at that, an individual who possesses the odd habit of imagining himself at times to be a cockroach; “Other humans gaze at the sky,” he explains, “ but I say unto you, the only way through the world is to pass through the underground.”Hage has more on his mind than allusions to Franz Kafka, however. Like Kafka’s many baffled protagonists, Hage’s anti-hero may be bewildered by the machinations of the world, but he is no mere observer, taking pains wherever and whenever he can to make his presence felt.Similar to the leads in De Niro’s Game, the narrator is not so much a hero as he is a survivor, but with a far bleaker approach to life. Unlike the start realism of the former novel’s, the narrator of Cockroach may or may not be on the brink of insanity, adding a surreal aspect to many of his daily encounters.Cockroach’s unnamed narrator is an immigrant to Canada, an man who ekes out a living through a combination of odd jobs, threats, and surreptitious thievery. After a haphazard suicide attempt, explained as being “a challenge to nature, to the cosmos itself, to the recurring light,” he is ordered to attend therapy sessions to assess his mental competency.The narrator is not having an easy time of it living in Montreal, the clash of cultures altering the man he perceives himself to be. “[H]ere in this Northern land,” he laments, comparing his new life to his old, “no one gives you an excuse to hit, rob, or shoot, or even to shout from across the balcony, to curse your neighbours’ mothers and threaten their kids.”Alongside a gift for breaking and entering, the narrator prides himself on his ability to lay bare the true natures of those who surround him. “I see people for what they are. I strip them of everything and see their hollowness. I strip them, and they are relieved of the burden of colour and disguise.”Hage writes his tale in short, declarative sentences, capturing the despondency of a life of potential trapped in a world as similarly rigid in its caste structure as the land that he left. The narrator grimly acknowledges himself and his acquaintances as “the scum of the earth in this capitalist endeavour,” and it becomes readily apparent that Hage did not have to trek too far to revisit the themes of isolation and pain that suffused the pages of Di Niro’s Game.Like that novel, Cockroach occasionally betrays a wicked wit beneath the pathos, manifesting through the narrator’s inserting himself into the lives of those he watches. “I was part of their TV dinner,” he writes after one young couple watches him as they would watch a reality television show, “I was spinning in a microwave, stripped of my plastic cover, eaten, and defecated the next morning just as the filtered coffee was brewing in the kitchen and the radio was prophesying the weather, telling them what to wear, what to buy, what to say, whom to watch, and whom to like and hate.”Despite its many admirable qualities, Cockroach is not flawless. There is an abrupt switch at the halfway point as a more formalized plot begins to force its way onto the page. The ending, involving a weirdly-played subplot of a mysterious figure who draws the attention of the narrator’s friends, feels rushed and incomplete.Cockroach is also, like its hero, a supremely frustrating creature, alternately fascinating and confused. By the finale, the skill of Hage is readily apparent, but there is a maddening sense of incompleteness to the whole of the novel, an impression exemplified by the narrator’s frequent digressions that entertain and provoke but don’t linger in the mind, a dilemma De Niro’s Game so effortlessly avoided.Nevertheless, Cockroach reveals Hage to be no mere fluke, but a fearless talent with his best years ahead. Regardless of its shortcomings, Cockroach exposes a world so otherworldly to most Canadians as to be near-unimaginable, and reveals an author on the cusp of greatness.