Early last century, Juan Mamo wrote the Ulied in-Nanna Venut fl-Amerika, which, with its blunt and iconoclastic prose, risqué jokes and graphic descriptions of a low-life Malta venturing out of the island into the big wide world, as exemplified by the US, has remained a classic of Maltese literature.

A century later, Guze Stagno, well-known (or rather notorious) for his previous books Inbid ta’ Kuljum, Xemx, Wisq Sabiha and Ramon u z-Zerbinotti, revisits the genre – only this time it’s Brussels and the new Malta in the EU that is the focus, rather than the US of early 20th century.

The link with Juan Mamo is mentioned in the book, but the derivation of the title is not. It’s Las Vegas: “What Happens in Vegas, Stays in Vegas”. It’s an ad slogan used since 2005 by the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. This famous nudge-nudge, wink-wink line evolved from the earlier advertising slogan “What Happens Here, Stays Here”, created in 2002 by the authority’s ad agency R&R Partners, Inc. Both versions suggest (not very subtly) that people can have sexual liaisons or do other wild and crazy things on vacation trips to Las Vegas and keep it secret.

The book is the rollicking description of one of those group trips to Brussels organised by MEPs. The protagonist is a journalist with the union paper Maltanews and the MEP is, obviously, a Labour one. The crowd (which we only meet on the plane trip out) is a caricature of a PL crowd that not even Daphne Caruana Galizia would dream of.

So far, so good. The preliminaries, the trip, the arrival, are all depicted as predictable, as long as one assumes a Labour crowd made up of people who have never moved out of their country. So too with a farce as the crowd is assigned rooms and its first venture from the hotel in Place Rogier to the Grand Place and a meal at a chosen restaurant with the two Labour MEPs, including Louis Grech.

By now, the journalist’s male antennae had begun to twitch at the sight of the MEP’s secretary who chaperoned the group around Brussels even though she, knowing her groups, suddenly yelled at them and urged them to boo at the sight of Dar Malta. The visit to the European Parliament descends into pure farce at the name of the Finnish official who took them around Pentii and the impossibility of getting a reply to the stock Labour complaint that “Brussels” is not helping Malta on the issue of illegal immigrants.

This is where, without knowing it, the journalist and the Maltese crowd part ways. The cause of this is the journalist’s ex-girlfriend who works in the Parliament and who invites him to go around with her.

The next day, after many travails in Bruges (there is a mistake in the book: the train to Bruges from the Gare de Nord, does not pass through the Gare Central, which is in the other direction), the journalist, now completely cut off from his group, his ex-girlfriend and the MEP’s secretary agree to go to a party a Maltese girl is giving.

Which is where all the climax (that’s a loaded word) of the story and of the book happens.

In between, the book is not just a sarcastic view of the gruff Labour supporters and their antics, but also a disenchanted view of Labour’s U-turn on the EU by an avowed Labour supporter and employee. This is mainly on the side: at the end, all’s well that ends well and, of course, what happens in Brussels, stays in Brussels.