W: Ian, welcome to Waterstones IM: Thank you
W: You've surprised us with the
announcement and the arrival of this new novella, shall we call it, The Cockroach.
IM: I surprised myself. I wasn't intending to write a quick book about this.
But I'd been on the road quite a while with Machines Like Me, my last novel
before this one. I found myself at home with a week and thought I really
want to write about Brexit. It's too complex, I'll write a short story. And I
just parodied the first sentence of Kafka's Metamorphosis and when that
paragraph first played off it just led to another. I then had to get back on the
airplanes and do another bit of touring and then came back and found myself,
I was still haunted by this short story. I had three weeks in August and I just
went on a roll. And it's one of these little things, I had it with
Nutshell, where a foetus is talking in the last two weeks of his life inside
the womb - that you can have an outrageous, completely impossible first sentence.
If you can persuade your reader across that line and if you persuade yourself across that
line, you can then proceed in a realist style. So the cockroach is inhabiting
the body of a prime minister but then from then on it's a prime
ministerial life. He's there to try and get through a project that's rather like
Brexit. I mean almost as stupid. No, probably less stupid.
It's called Reversalism, where you just reverse the money flow so that you have
to pay for a job and if you go shopping you get lots of money for all the goods
you've taken away. So here I am. I'd no idea, if you'd told me in June I'd be
talking to you about a new book, I would;d have said you're completely nuts.
There won't be another one for three years.
W: This sort of desire to write satire at a time like this; so
we're recording this interview the day after the Supreme Court
ruling about prorogation, the House of Commons has just opened again, they're in
there debating. And with everything happening here and across the pond with
Trump sometimes politics when you turn on the news can seem to be almost beyond
satire because it's self-satirising. Were you ever worried about dealing with the real news?
IM: there were certain moments along the way when I thought the reality
is beyond satire, just as you say. So for example I came to a point where I wanted
to sum up my cockroach prime minister's first statement to the House of Commons
so I looked in Hansard and looked at Boris Johnson's sort of mission
statement. I thought I cannot better this so I simply took it and then just fiddled
around with the edges of it and condensed it a bit. We have now reached a
point where Brexit as a project is a kind of religion, it has a mystical
flavour. No one makes any economic arguments for it anymore, there are no
economic arguments for it, there are no sovereignty arguments. I can't see a
single argument for it except that it's gone into kind of blood and
soil mysticism. And I think the only reason we're leaving is because. As the
German Chancellor says to Jim Sams or or rather as he say to the German
Chancellor when he runs out of reasons: We're leaving because. Because we said we
would and because the people said they wanted it, that's it.
W: So with The Cockroach obviously there is an entertainment in reading, in the satire.
I wonder whether you hope that readers might also take something more serious away from it.
IM: This novel really comes out of that point where despair meets
laughter coming the other way. So that's what's important about it. It never
occurred to me to really consider what benign effect would come with this, I
just had to get this down and I wanted a reader to have some fun along the way
and some relief. I sometimes ask myself is there a life for this book after
Brexit and I hope there is It's not a Roman à clef, you can't identify any of
the cockroaches against any of the ministers in cabinet. But I think it has
a possible life as a warning when a political project gets so intense that
people forget what the reason of it is and begin to try and do things without
reference to Parliament. And I think we've been just at that point.
I celebrated with many others last night. 'To the enemies of the people', we raised
our glass. When the Supreme Court gave its most scathing and illuminating
judgement last night, that the executive is the servant of the parliament. And if
you want to live in a free open democratic society, however inconvenient
it is sometimes, you can't get your project through by October the 31st you've got
to make that accommodation. Free, open, just societies are often slow-moving and
and inconvenient for your intense desires but it's worth it.
Do you care to make any predictions about what might happen?
There is a forking path, to use Borges's phrase for it.
That either he gets a deal or he doesn't. So actually that's one.
If he doesn't the next forking path is does he obey the law?
Parliament has said if you don't get a deal then you've got to ask
for an extension. Will he try and wriggle around that or not? And I think
Parliament is quite right now they're all back this morning, this afternoon, to
say we're not going anywhere yet until we get an undertaking that you're going
to obey the law. Now I think frivolously if Johnson does disobey the
law then he might have to go to prison. And let's not forget that before he got
into all this he was halfway through his book on Shakespeare. Now if he could get
a cell on his own I would like him to finish that book and I'd like you and he
to be sitting here discussing it in a year's time.
W: Watch this space.