In an arresting opening sequence, the different characters are shocked at the sight of a large pig careering through the streets of Brussels except that no one is never quite sure that pig is always the same one or whether the pig or pigs actually exist.
Characters from the two stories cross each other's paths in the avenues and cemeteries of Brussels but the only explicit connection between the two narratives is a wild pig chase. Inspector Brunfaut is the Belgian local, the mildly disillusioned cop, who finds his betters generally worse in their scant regard for justice.
The plan to have an event centred around concentration camp survivors as the focal point of the EU Commission anniversary is deftly sabotaged in an exquisite palace drama of bureaucratic treachery. He is brilliantly comic on the gladiatorial combats of careerist ambition and barely disguised national self-interest which engage the lives of Fenia Xenopolou, Kai-Uwe Frigge, George Morland and Romolo Strozzi in the Commission. In an arresting opening sequence, the different characters are shocked at the sight of a large pig careering through the streets of Brussels Menasse assembles his cast from the different member states – an ambitious Cyrpiot, a melancholy Austrian, a fanatical Pole, a patrician Italian, a wry Belgian – but he gives their inner lives a complexity that belies the satirical shorthand of simple labels.
Within this, the migrant crisis and terrorism act as narrative devices that bring contradictions to the fore and lives to an end. The novel is structured around two main stories, a plan to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the foundation of the European Commission and unsolved murder which is hushed up by higher authorities.
In The Capital he sets out to demonstrate that the common market in the unlovely form of EU bureaucracy is primarily an affair of the heart, albeit a heart whose beat is becoming increasingly erratic as the result of internal hubris and external disaffection. Robert Menasse, one of Austria's leading contemporary novelists, clearly does not agree. What's good for business isn't necessarily great for the emotions. Jacques Delors, a former president of the European Commission, once famously quipped that you cannot fall in love with a Common Market.
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