Strasbourg goose chase

Europa, Tim Parks's eighth novel, features a triumphantly merciless return to his specialist subject of male rancour after a couple of comparatively soft-hearted recent excursions. Parks's last novel, Mimi's Ghost, was merely a very black comedy featuring a serial killer in the Veneto and in An Italian Education, his follow up to the best-selling Italian Neighbours, he delivered an unblinking dissection of the foibles of his family and friends as well as of his adopted countrymen. Europa, delivered with Parks's customary technical brilliance, deals with the doomed quest for ideals; whether in love, philosophy or the European Union.

Jerry Marlowe, fortysomething English language lecturer at the University of Milan, is a delegate travelling to petition the European parliament in Strasbourg about the poor treatment of foreign lecturers in Italy. Through his jaundiced eye Parks lays bare the confusions of a certain type of modern mind-set. Marlowe is racked as much by self-disgust as by contempt for the things he sees around him. On an uncomfortable journey for a cause he doesn't believe in for an institution he thinks probably shouldn't exist, most of his trip is spent mentally re-running the break- up of an affair. And all because he glimpsed his former mistress's name, perhaps written with the same pen as a male colleague, on the list of petitioners when he was asked to sign up.

It has been said that the true nature of Parks's gift is ventriloquy, an unusual power to assume appropriate voices. In the character of Jerry he has once again conjured an utterly unattractive and deeply convincing man. The self-destructive nature of his rancour is agonisingly teased out as he realises that he's actually got nothing against the idea of the European Union or happy marriages or any of the other things that so appal him. What he objects to is other people's ingenuous subscription to these things.

Parks deftly and chillingly reflects Jerry's constant revision of his own thoughts and beliefs in the light of an ever-changing environment. Arrival at the Strasbourg bureaucratic labyrinth, an expression of the European ideal made concrete, confirms the uselessness of nearly all public rhetoric to convey the complexities of anything important. Language itself is finally made as unreliable as the people who misuse it.

This is a thoughtfully realised book that pushes its humour into ever darker shades of black and illuminates both personal and political malaise with a shockingly honest clarity. But what's new? Tim Parks continues to write some of the best fiction of the last decade and critics continue to praise him. If there was any justice, or even logic, at the Booker- ish end of Grub Street, he would be a literary star. But justice, let alone logic, have long been at a premium. Is there any wonder he writes about rancorous males?