Media organisations report alarming falls in circulation or ratings for editions dominated by Brexit. So there is a risk that fatigue with the subject of the European Union will reduce our appetite for Robert Menasse’s 2017 German-language bestseller – a satirical novel about the workings of the multinational Brussels bureaucracy – which is timed to appear in English just ahead of the UK’s scheduled departure from the EU.

But if the enervating news coverage does depress the book’s prospects, it would be cruelly unfair to Menasse, a 64-year-old Austrian whose work spans novels, poetry and political theory. The Capital delivers, within a brilliant satirical fiction, thoughtful and instructive analysis of both the weaknesses in the EU that galvanise leavers and the strengths that motivate remainers.

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. 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. 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.

The only Brit is, with a structural realism that also makes a mordant point, a very minor figure. 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. 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. 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.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Porkers become The Capital’s governing metaphor. Photograph: Focke Strangmann/EPA

Porkers become the book’s governing metaphor. 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. 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. 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.

In another bureaucratic paradox, an EU conference delegate notes that “from the opening of their session there had been consensus that Europe’s crisis could be solved only with those very methods that brought it on in the first place.” This phrasing recalls Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, and The Capital, in scope and tone, suggests a fusion of Heller’s war comedy with his other masterpiece, Something Happened, a dark comedy of office life.

Menasse sardonically details the tactics of EU politicians, such as the advantage that a chair can gain from conducting a meeting in one of the weaker languages of the most troublesome participants. Long-serving commissioners warn newcomers of the vital importance of ceasing to read the media from your home country; to flourish in Brussels, you must become pan-national.

Yet, beneath this farcical power-playing, the novel reflects and respects the roots of the EU as an attempt, led by France and Germany, to insure against a repetition of the continent’s conflicts and genocides. The Belgian detective’s father was a resistance fighter; a war cemetery is a recurrent location; and a crucial subplot involves a challenge to the EC’s ranks of statisticians to establish exactly how many concentration camp survivors remain alive. Ridiculous as the Brussels jawing may be, it is explicitly balanced against the former warring.

Lacking German, I can’t assess the accuracy of Jamie Bulloch’s translation, but the English prose has a panache and clarity rare in exported literature. The jaunty playing with words – such as the compound “conscience-nonsense”,a mix-up over the words “statist” and “statistician”, and a pun involving “sanctum” and “sanctimony” – are fittingly reminiscent of that most Eurocentric of recent British novelists, Anthony Burgess. Bulloch also trusts readers to grasp, or at least intuit, untranslated French, German, Czech and Flemish.

Readers may understandably feel that a novel about the EU is the last thing they need just now; but if so they will miss a first-class read.

• The Capital by Robert Menasse, translated by Jamie Bulloch, is published by MacLehose (RRP £15). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.