Last year, someone put online a brilliant mock-up of an old orange Penguin paperback cover: Brexit by Franz Kafka. How do you make a show of people who are doing such a fabulous job of making a show of themselves? McEwan manages to do so with great style and comic panache. Brexit has such a camp, knowing, performative quality that it is almost impossible to inflate it any further. And even in that McEwan faces a formidable challenge. It is written to comfort and entertain those who already believe that the Brexit project is deranged. The Cockroach aims not to persuade or in any profound sense to critique. In that context, McEwan has more limited (and realistic) ambitions. In the era of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, the rulers create their own grotesque self-parodies and flaunt them before their adoring fans. But ours is an age of political shamelessness. Its mechanism was shame: the rulers would see an image of themselves in the distorting mirror of the writer’s fable, feel ashamed of themselves and resolve to be better. The classical idea that satire can reform the polity has even less purchase now than it had in Swift’s 18th century. His short, sharp satire on Brexit is not going to stop it, or to change the mind of any reader who supports it.

It seems safe to assume that Ian McEwan does not suffer from Gulliver’s delusions. When did its mockery ever put a full stop to the abuses it attacks? His chief complaint was that his book had failed to change anything: “instead of seeing a full stop put to all abuses and corruptions, at least in this little island, as I had reason to expect: behold, after above six months warning, I cannot learn that my book hath produced one single effect according to mine intentions…” The joke is not just on Gulliver, but on Swift himself and indeed on the art of satire. W hen he published the second edition of the greatest of political satires, Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift prefaced it with an outraged letter from Gulliver himself.

Reviews of lessons by ian mcewan