SOURCE: “A Coach with a Cargo of Sex,” in Spectator, April 12, 1997, pp. 41–42.

In the following review, Lively offers a positive assessment of Europa.

The format of Europa is an exotic gloss on the country-house detective novel—a finite group of characters cloistered together over a prescribed period. Six foreign lectors from Milan University, with an accompanying body of students to lend moral support, are taking a coach trip to Strasbourg to present a petition to the European Parliament over their pay and terms of employment: a sober and mundane background to what is in fact a prolonged howl of anguish, self-reproach and sexual reminiscence by the narrating lector, Jerry.

The concept is a clever framework for reflections about cultural identity and what it means to be European. Jerry's lost mistress—who is of the coach party, which may be the very reason he has joined it—is French...