This is Europe: The Way We Live Now – Cross-border complexities

What is Europe? A continent beset by war and recently plague, countries often more remarkable by their difference than their similarity, a political union increasingly unsure of itself. It’s a knotty question. This is Europe by Ben Judah knits 23 vignettes from people who live here, from Ireland to Turkey, attempting to understand what makes this continent work. Or perhaps, more foundational: what makes it a continent?

Any attempt to articulate a coherent European identity is such an ambitious project it automatically deserves applause. And Judah eschews the obvious methodology. Just as in his last book, This is London, This is Europe is not a work overtly interested in data, history or Byzantine bureaucracies. Of course these things hum in the background: a man who moves cargo through Rotterdam port; a lorry driver who delivers that cargo to northern Italy. But it is the life of the truck driver – how he met his girlfriend on the road, for example – that matters.

Judah does not shy away from the politics, the devastating impacts of the pandemic or the war. One memorable chapter tracks a couple – Lyosha and Olya – who met on the frontline in Adviika, Ukraine. Ionut, a Romanian truck driver, bore first witness to the early creep of the virus: “Then everything stopped. The company was suspending operations: the job was cancelled – Go back to Romania. They drove back as the borders were closing. They drove as fast as they could.” But This is Europe reminds us of the fact that below every system and conflict there are human beings.

Judah has an impressive knack for getting his subjects to speak candidly and never seems to censor their contentious moments. In a lively chapter we meet Ibrahim, the Syrian porn maker who lives in Budapest. He taxonomises his various woman co-stars via their national identity: the Russians are “hard to read”; the Spanish women not particularly enthusiastic; the French are “jealous” and “moody”; Hungarians “do it just for work”. Those of a sensitive disposition might balk – either at the stereotyping, the crudeness, or perhaps the misogyny. But this is Ibrahim’s story, Judah is merely relating it.

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After all, this is a work of observational reportage. It is not a moral treatise. Judah hasn’t written a parable, though there is one message looming in the background. This is Europe – accidentally or not – tells us the entire continent is defined by cross-border movement. We meet a couple – one Viennese, one Turkish – who met on an Erasmus year in Amsterdam. When Sezen moved back to Turkey to complete her legal training the pair initially split up. Now they live in Istanbul with a child.

It is not clear where Judah’s personal politics lie. But it is impossible to deny the internationalism sitting at the core of every story he tells. The idea that movement of people is neither good nor bad but at the core of Europeanness is a radical – if obvious – idea. This is Europe starts in the port in Rotterdam – the aorta of Europe, the locus of trade. And if this is where the book starts, it only makes sense that it comes to a close in Ireland – a huge beneficiary of its membership first to the European Economic Community and then the European Union. A place changed radically – financially, culturally – by the trading bloc.

Ireland’s technological revolution and outsize soft power has transformed a country once considered too small to be anything more than an oddity on Europe’s cold western shoulder. But in characteristic style none of this is Judah’s focus. Instead we meet Sheila, a solicitor who is dying of cancer in Castletownroche, Cork. She is married to half Swede, half Finn, Patrick. They have a young daughter, Moya. Judah does not dwell on the knotty politics of Brexit or the fact that contemporary Ireland is unrecognisable from its recent past. No, Judah is interrogating what it is like to be a mother dying of cancer in the grounds of an Irish castle. We leave with the understanding that to die there is like it is to die anywhere: a fear of leaving a child behind, an appreciation of the little things in life. It is moving but never strays into mawkishness.

Judah writes in a staccato style, often in the second person. At times it can feel wearying and perhaps the book is not to be read in a single sitting. But when it works – and it mostly does – it reflects the heart of the project. These characters are not figures of history, nor are they mere data points. The Syrian man in Budapest is probably still making porn as you read this; Jelle likely still works in Rotterdam; the winemaker in Meursault is presumably worried about today’s weather and how it may affect his autumn harvest.

A cynic may say it lacks a thesis. Judah would take that as a compliment. Europe is burdened with a difficult past. Who knows what it will look like in a decade’s time? But This is Europe, in the present tense.