The Roaches Have No King

Very amusing view of humanity from the perspective of cockroaches. Clever and funny in the way that Julian Barnes wants to be but isn't. A lot of fun!

In the Book it is not considered plenty when insects eat well. It's called plague. But how could we be punished when we are the punishment?

This was a revisiting of a book I read for the first time as a teenager. I absolutely adored it back then and used to call it one of my favorite books for years. As a huge bug fan and cockroach enthusiast, a crass story from the point of view of a cockroach colony inhabiting an apartment was an incredibly fun experience for me.
I had a feeling though that going back to it this many years later I would not have the same reaction to the book and I was right.

Again, the concept of writing a story from the point of view of a colony of Blattella Germanica, a common kind of roaches, trying to survive in an apartment that is going through some changes due to the relationships of the human tenant, is an incredibly fun one to me. The roach interactions are written very well for the most part with a lot of detail to their actual anatomy and way of living. Things like having the roaches get their names from the first thing they read after being born, many of them growing up from the glue in books and therefore having a personality imprinted on them from those texts, is a great idea and makes for a lot of entertaining brief character moments.
I also enjoyed how graphic some moments can be as some of the roaches have to endure some terrible things under the hand of the human tenant. There is a serious gore element to this book as roach deaths are described in a lot of detail and the bugs are imbued with enough personality to make it even harder to read at points.
It makes sense for a book about the life of ordinary cockroaches to be so grimy at many points. And a lot of these have been memorable to me. Some of them are wild like a moment where the protagonist roach comes across an aborted fetus in the sewers and has a cathartic beatdown, fed by his frustrations with humans at the time.

The unique protagonists are also used for some interesting and rather entertaining social commentary or exploration of human life. The differences between the autonomous and survival-driven cockroach and the more spontaneous and shame-driven human are commented on very frequently by the protagonist roach and can be pretty clever. There are thoughts and discussions between roaches on shallow beauty standards, hypocritical morals, questionable mating behavior, religion, and other things while observing their human adversaries.
Unfortunately, there are also attempts at racially charged commentary, which comes across as very heavy-handed, and together with the author's already odd focus on the ethnicities of characters and stereotypes, it makes for some uncomfortable and unnecessary pages. This is the side of this novel's crass nature that I cannot appreciate. Reading a white author create a stereotypical Afro-American living in the “ghetto” for example felt misguided, and having characters very often be reduced and called by their ethnicity throughout the book just seemed a bit strange.
Some of the graphic moments also go into very daring sexual territories; I wouldn't blame anyone to put down the book after reading those. This book certainly goes places.

This re-read really has been a conflicting experience through and through. Weiss' The Roaches Have No King undoubtedly has a general story concept that I absolutely love, and as long as the focus lies on the survival of and interaction between the roaches, I did enjoy this book greatly for the most part. But I cannot deny that Weiss' character writing is questionable at many points and his attempts at social commentary come across as pretty tone-deaf in some chapters.
I probably can't deny that reading it as a teenager added a lot to my still persisting love and fascination for bugs, which I appreciate. But this is definitely a flawed book with some extended ill-advised tangents.