Each chapter is named for a town or city, and each focuses upon a specific individual, sometimes telling their life-in-a-day, sometimes a more concerted narrative (the progress of a refugee the flight of a political dissident). It takes the form of 23 social vignettes, interspersed with the monochrome, Sebaldian photography that was scattered through his London book (though there are more here). This Is Europe is, first and foremost, an epic work of assiduous and empathetic reportage. In trying to gather up his vast subject - this ‘continent of seven hundred and forty-eight million people’ as he reminds us in his opening lines - he drops as much as he carries. By turns revelatory, thrilling, boring and baffling, Judah’s history of the present is necessarily uneven. This Is Europe misses such occasion or argument. And this migrant megacity, he rightly identified, required the fresh and probing literary treatment he gave it. London changed dramatically within the two decades Judah had lived there, primarily due to the rapid rise of multiculturalism. His last book ( This Is London, to which this is something of a sequel) had a tight thesis. As Judah delivers an introductory slap on Europe’s shoulder and announces ‘this is…’ we realise that whole landmasses, entire tectonics are within his purview. To seize the domain of what Martin Amis called the nineteenth-century ‘superpower novel’ - the novel that is ‘800 pages long, about the whole of society’ - and claim it for journalism.Īnd forget just the whole of society. In Ben Judah’s presumably conscious appropriation, we can detect a more profound mission statement. ‘The way we live now’ was the subject of the social-realist novel long before Trollope, and has continued to be so long after sleepy Barsetshire was bulldozed, tower-blocked and ring-roaded. It takes a writer of immense ambition to crib the title of Anthony Trollope’s masterpiece for his subtitle. This Is Europe: The Way We Live Now by Ben Judah (Picador, £22)
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