We are presently slouching towards an election in which the issue of Europe, however little discussed, is bound to arouse bitter passions. Those of a sceptical persuasion may take comfort from this interesting if rather tiring novel, which presents the new Europe as simultaneously a tragedy and a farce.

Europa is a fevered, obsessive interior monologue by Jerry Marlowe, one of a group of foreign-language lecturers from Milan University on a coach trip to Strasbourg, where they will make representations to various subsets of the European Parliament. At issue are the lecturers’ working conditions, which are less cosy than those enjoyed by their Italian colleagues, and therefore, perhaps, discriminatory under European law. The hijacking of a progressive and benevolent piece of legislation by such a band of desperate, self-serving hacks sets a tone of cynicism and absurdity which seeps through the entire book. The journey itself is a mock-heroic progress: a craven pilgrimage, an Odyssey of opportunism.

Jerry has been practising European integration on a more localized level, and he has the scars to prove it. He has left his Italian wife to pursue a spicy and intellectually invigorating affair with a French colleague, pointedly unnamed until the final page. This affair has itself ended “very, very badly”; she has been sleeping with a German colleague as “the final piece in a mosaic of friendship,” and cannot understand Jerry's violent, possessive jealousy. Jerry is given to believe that he is insufficiently “European” for things to have worked out between them: that is, according to her, insufficiently enlightened, sophisticated and rational; or, according to him, insufficiently selfish, equivocal and faithless—though in fact he is all of these things.

Jerry has no truck with the Enlightenment. For him the most preposterous thing about the preposterous Avvocato Malerba, a law lecturer who has come along to help brief the delegation, is not his EU tie but the fact that he prefers Spinoza to Nietzsche. Descartes also takes a hammering: “The world must be as it appears to be, the Frenchman deduced, because a perfect God would not wish to deceive us. Nothing has been explicable since.” Even classical Greece, generally claimed as a model by modern liberal democracy, is for Jerry dark, mysterious and chaotic; the birth of Europe an affair of perverse imperatives and tribal enmities.

Perverse imperatives also hold sway over his present life. He joins the delegation, even at the cost of missing his daughter's eighteenth birthday, not through solidarity with his colleagues, whom he mostly despises, nor in any hope of saving his job—which he realizes he would be lucky to lose—but because he notices that his ex-mistress and their German colleague have signed up for the trip on consecutive lines of the form, possibly even using the same pen. Other male lecturers cite a more straightforward reason for participating. Several students, mostly female, all excited by what they see as an idealistic crusade, have joined the delegation, and may look kindly on even the most blundering seducer. The resulting manoeuvres, along with the anaesthetic trappings of modern travel and the bland standardization of the new Europe, are drolly noted by Jerry in the midst of his febrile introspection.

Even if not an unreliable narrator in the usual sense, Jerry is not entirely reliable. He spends much of the novel knocking back whisky, cheap red wine and Bromazepam, but it is misanthropy that clouds his judgment most fatally. He is creative enough to account for the standardization of vegetable sizes by the EU in terms of Plato's theory of ideal forms, yet he sees the scrubbed and floodlit façade of Strasbourg cathedral as something banal.

Tim Parks captures precisely the atmosphere of those marginal teaching jobs which one only takes in the absence of other opportunities, and which one gradually becomes too fearful to leave. The bluff, misogynistic badinage of lonely middle-aged men is rendered with due distaste, but also a kind of crude poignancy. Best of all is the way the narrative adroitly hopscotches between the personal and the political. The unpredictability of foreign-currency exchanges echoes the volatility of human relationships; the irony of siting Europe's legislative capital in a town which does not know whether it is French or German is made to emphasize the melancholy statelessness of a twice-divorced Welsh-Asian lecturer, the obscenely vivid but manifestly ill-starred Vikram Griffiths. But lovers of the full stop had better look elsewhere. Europa’s mazy, paratactic style can easily grate. Jerry Marlowe is perhaps not, in the end, a man with whom to share a long journey.