When this impasse hardens after an intervention from the health and safety directorate over veterinary standards, the member EU states insist on negotiating separately with China, leading to a global price slump.

The agricultural wing wishes to reduce pig production, in order to stabilise falling European pork prices, while the farming arm seeks to substantially increase the sow count to meet growing Chinese demand for pork products. Even the most dedicated European single-marketer may warm to World Trade Organisation terms after Menasse’s bravura account of the long-running “sow wars” between the EU’s agriculture and trade divisions. Porkers become the book’s governing metaphor. Porkers become The Capital’s governing metaphor. Inspector Brunfaut, a cop with knowing nods to Maigret, investigates a case that nods to Belgian cultural hero Magritte: surreally, a key lead is a pig that witnesses keep reporting at large in the city. A Pole with two names, an Austrian professor and an elderly German resident of a rest home also play roles that are clarified only gradually, as the political life of Brussels overlaps with the broader story of a murder at a city hotel. George Morland, intended to be Britain’s last commissioner to the EU, is a pink-faced Johnsonian (Boris, sadly, not Samuel) show-off toff, whose aim is to trash the room before his nation goes. The only Brit is, with a structural realism that also makes a mordant point, a very minor figure. Through metres of emails and weeks of meetings, Susman negotiates with colleagues including Fenia Xenopoulou, a Greek in the culture directorate, and superiors such as Kai-Uwe Frigge, a German commissioner of trade, who is a master of the EU art of helping himself while hindering rivals.

Martin Susman, an Austrian who serves on the EC’s culture and education directorate, comes up with an idea, based on the organisation’s founding aim of ensuring Auschwitz is never forgotten or repeated. Menasse dramatises a EU which, due to the rise of Eurosceptic nationalism in many member nations, is “threatening to break apart”, with the further complication, for future planning, that “Britain wasout of the game, even though she was still hanging around the pitch.” In the hope of improving public opinion, the European Commission, the EU’s governing body, plans a “special project” to mark the 50th anniversary of its foundation.

Robert menasse the capital