Jerry Marlow is on a coach hurtling from Milan to Strasbourg, even though he loathes coaches and everything they stand for: ...all the contemporary pieties of getting people together and moving them off in one direction or another to have fun together, or to edify themselves, or to show solidarity to some underprivileged minority and everybody, as I said, being of the same mind and of one intent, every individual possessed by the spirit of the group, which is the very spirit apparently of humanity, and indeed that of Europe, come to think of it, which this group is now hurtling off to appeal. Jerry, suffice to say, is not a team player--not even when it comes to saving his own job. Together with a group of colleagues and students from the University of Milan, he's off to the European Parliament to protest new Italian laws against hiring foreigners--a cause which he opposes, appealing to an institution he's not sure should exist. So why is Jerry on the coach in the first place? Because she is there--the same she for whom Jerry left his wife and daughter and who has since broken his heart. The unnamed she in question is a beautiful French woman (of course), a hellcat in bed (it goes without saying), and an intellect of notable refinement (naturellement). She was also unfaithful, and now they scarcely speak to one another. The rest of this dark and often savagely funny novel (shortlisted for the 1997 Booker Prize) consists of one great Joycean rant, a stream-of-consciousness harangue that circles obsessively around sex, the treachery of she, and Jerry's boundless misanthropy. In between we get glimpses of the bus and its motley cast of characters, including, most vividly, Vikram Griffiths, part Welsh, part Indian, with his nervous tics and his self-consciously Welsh accent and his shaggy mutt, Dafydd. As one might deduce from the title, the dream of the new, unified Europe looms behind this tale like--well, like a big, unwieldy metaphor, given expression in the form of Jerry's affair. As a meditation on the continent's future, the novel works surprisingly well, and though it initially takes some time to sort out the looping rhythms of Parks's prose, the reader's patience is repaid in spades. --Mary Park
From Library Journal
"The thing that most terrified the Greeks was that they would be deceived by the Gods." So reflects protagonist Jerry Marlow near the end of this piercingly perceptive black comedy, short-listed for Britain's Booker Prize. Indeed, deception lies at the heart of this picaresque tale of sexual obsession and political absurdity. Marlow agrees to join a group of expatriate lecturers from the University of Milan on a pilgrimage to the European Parliament in Strasbourg to protest an Italian government plan seemingly designed to eliminate their jobs. Unhappy in his job anyway, Marlow notices that his ex-lover is going and, well, just maybe.... Writing from Marlow's stream-of-consciousness perspective, Parks (Juggling the Stars, LJ 2/1/93) explores more than the mind of one man. He offers a perceptive commentary on the place of passion in our lives and the despair and hope it offers as we struggle to find our way in an increasingly bland world. Serious readers will not be put off by the European perspective of the novel; its themes are truly universal. Highly recommended for academic and larger public libraries.ADavid W. Henderson, Eckerd Coll. Lib., St. Petersburg, FL
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Parks, author of superb nonfiction works as well as the smoldering novel Shear (1994), has written another tale of gripping psychological complexity that reflects the paradoxes of the world at large. It all takes place in the churning mind of Jeremy Marlowe, an Englishman teaching at the University of Milan who has left his wife and 18-year-old daughter for a fellow foreign lecturer only to endure a disastrous end to their affair. He has surprised himself by his uncharacteristically social decision to accompany his colleagues and a group of mostly female students on a trip to Strasbourg to petition the European Parliament in an effort to secure their precarious jobs. "She" is present, and so is Vikram Griffiths, the part-Indian, part-Welsh ringleader, an empathic figure of cultural dissonance. As Jeremy obsessively rehashes the ups and downs of his passionate involvement with the beautiful but maddening Frenchwoman, he finds parallels in the still nascent, perhaps impossible dream of a European union. In fact, every exchange, from the most erotic to the most formal, is charged with anguish and wit and refracts the depth of the divides between men and women, nations and faiths. Donna Seaman
Review
Parks maybe an old pro, but this is amateur stuff. -- The New York Times Book Review, David Gates
From The Washington Post
...a serious writer working with serious themes, and Europa, in spite of an unsatisfactory ending, is a novel well worth the effort required to keep track of its narrative thread.
