Brexit makes sense in here
------spoiler alert------
Before the pandemic, I had a weird habit: I used to get in book shops to check the list of best sellers, but just the shops I knew there was a list of English books. These lists were updated every week. I was used to checking the list, but do not buy any book. However, on the black Friday of 2019, all the books from the list were with a 20% reduction in price. I, as a good bargainer, checked which was the shortest book, and bought it. This book and a pack with six bottles of bio laundry softener for half price were my proud Black Friday acquisitions. I choose the shortest book because I wanted something I could go through in a couple of weeks...it took me six months! I guess because the book was not the most exciting I have read. Whenever I started to read, no matter where I was, I needed either to read several times the same paragraph or I slept. I am used to reading scientific papers that are by default the most boring literature ever, nevertheless, this book was even more painful than most of these papers!
To be honest, I can not tell what I did not like in the book, but I have two suggestions: the style and the lack of action. Maybe it was because of the style. Maybe I am just not used to a narrative on the British style -- J. K. Rowling is not an exception. I need to try more British authors to check this out. Also, I got the impression that the author uses a lot of passive voice and not many direct quotes from the characters. The lack of direct quotes makes it unclear to me who is talking/thinking in many moments. Maybe this is the reason why I had to read the same paragraph again and again -- maybe I have a reading disability I am not aware of. Another possibility is the plot, there is not much action on the story and maybe I am biased toward stories in which a lot is going on. This may explain why I loved the book with the summary of Brazilian history -- a lot happened in 520 years! The truth is that so far I can not identify the origin of my sleepiness when I was reading this book.
In summary, the story is about Jim Sams. He is a cockroach that one day wakes up as a man. This man is the prime minister of England. Jim dedicates himself to pass a controversial bill, the Reversalism. The Reversalism, as I understood, is the inversion of the economy, bought goods come with a currency that must be spent on work. People get paid for going shopping and they need to pay to work. He does political maneuvers that are also controversial to get the Parlament on his side and pass the bill. He tries to get international support of the American president Archie Tupper, known for his easy and impactfull tweets and the German chancellor, a skeptical woman that questions Jim's engagement with such a bill. Sound familiar, right? Yes, it is an explicit analogy to Brexit and, when I was awake, I found it hilarious! The story is indeed interesting, definitively this was not the reason why the book was not exciting to me.
Anyway, it is a well-thought story. Some of the analogies to reality were enlightening. For example, the Tupper's shallow but judgmental tweets: this is GOOD or that is BAD and how they influence worldwide politics. Or the lack of a reasonable explanation for Jim's attachment to the Reversalism bill which can be simply an ideological conviction without practical advantages -- wow, what a coincidence! Also, as a biologist, I loved the precision of how a cockroach life is described on biological terms. How they use pheromones to communicate, details about their feeding behavior and anatomy. This in-depth view into the life of a cockroach paved the way for interesting predictions of the biological struggles that a cockroach should have if it would, suddenly, become a human.
From the moments I could enjoy the book, I separated two of my favorites quotes:
When Jim was writing a letter to discredit his foreign secretary that conspired against the Reversalism:
"There was nothing more liberating than a closely knit sequence of lies. So this was why people became writers." Page 71. Fantastic!
When Jim, back to his cockroach form, talked to his cockroach community about their experience in human bodies:
"As you discovered, it is not easy to be Homo sapiens sapiens. Their desires are so often in contention with their intelligence." Page 99.
Although I would not recommend the book to my past self. The well-done analogy to political reality is worth reading. The take-home message I got it is that the only way Brexit would make some sense in practical terms it would be if Brexit supporters and Boris Johnson were cockroaches that came in human form with some hidden intentions to bring people to low sanitary conditions so that they could be back to their glory times.
I "kindly asked" a friend of mine that happened to be British to have the book and read it in the hope he could understand better that I and explain to me what I did not get.
