Meet Ibrahim, from Syria. He fled Aleppo just before the bombs began to fall. A clean $4,000 in cash to a smuggler got him a fake passport and, voilà, a ticket to Europe – briefly in Greece, then in Germany (‘the people, they looked different’), now in Spain. Immigrant life was tough at first: the strange language, the alien norms, the overt racism. ‘He was not on their level. Just a refugee.’ Then a lucky break. He starred in a homemade porn video that went viral: ‘100 per cent real Arab bull.’ Next, he’s earning close to a seven-figure salary, owns a flash car and has women dripping off his arm.

In Ben Judah’s illuminating depiction of modern-day Europe, almost everyone has a dream. Of the 23 personal narratives around which This Is Europe is built (each character gets his or her own chapter), almost half belong to refugees. The remainder herald from the peripheries, either geographic (Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, Russia’s frozen north) or socio-economic (poor, low-skilled, rural). As a collective, longing defines them: a wish for a better future, an aspiration for a happier present.

So, does Europe deliver? Does this continent of nearly 750 million people have the space and solidarity for all its residents, whatever their background, to flourish? It’s the question Szilvia asks herself as she works a dead-end supermarket job in a backwater Hungarian town (only the occasional store invasion by wild dogs shakes her from the sense that ‘she could be anywhere’). Then there’s Aboud, living constantly by the clock, stealing an hour or two with his chronically depressed wife before it’s back to his Amazon delivery van and Berlin’s unfriendly suburbs. And Ionut, the Romanian trucker who longs to swap his life of gruelling motorways and grubby lorry parks for a career as a singer.

Ibrahim’s success story, it turns out, is the exception. As the testimonies of Judah’s carefully selected informants reveal, barriers to personal progress abound. Europe is often cast as bureaucratically sclerotic, all advancement thwarted by the primacy of protecting social rights, but such measures rarely reach the margins, it would seem. Consider the fate of Nazneen, the Afghan-Iranian refugee left stranded by her Greek bosses on an island olive farm as a forest fire raged. Or Natasha and German, the Belarusian couple forced into exile simply for attending a peaceful protest. Forget solidarity: it’s social isolation that defines them. 

The dividing line between Europe’s haves and the have-nots is seismic. That is Judah’s central conceit, and one that his characters (all skilfully described) step up one after the other to endorse. Simone, a well-meaning soul, volunteers for mountain rescue in the Italian Alps. Week after week he watches African migrants traipsing up to the high passes of ‘Fortress Europe’, equipped with nothing but Google Maps and battered sneakers. Only in the spring, when melting snow gives up the corpses, can they count the dead. ‘It was almost like there were two categories of human being,’ Simone says: ‘Those who could and those who couldn’t.’

For readers looking for a clear analysis of the whys and wherefores of such bifurcation of opportunity, This Is Europe will disappoint. As with Judah’s previous book, the critically acclaimed This Is London, the focus is on detailing the stark realities of ‘lived Europe’, not on theorising about them. In the case of London, Judah slummed it with tramps and misfits. This time he takes a step back, still travelling and interviewing (although by Zoom when Covid constraints required), but then writing himself out of the story.

The result – a mix of verbatim reporting and journalistic re-enactment – is designed to deliver intimacy with the protagonists. Judah’s direct, at times staccato, prose accentuates this desire to evoke the closest feeling to ‘being inside their heads’. The following is from the story of David, a shepherd in Portugal, on seeing his house consumed by flames:

The hillside, the farm, it was scrubbed with ash. He got closer, closer to the house.
You should never see this.
A skeleton of black beams.
David didn’t cry.
The winds had gone…
‘OK, it’s done. It’s done.
There’s nothing I can do about it.’

This Is Europe is a bold literary and journalistic experiment. Judah knows how to tell a story and does so with panache. The chapter on Haidar, a gay Syrian who found liberation among the drag queens of Berlin (‘It was gone… the conflict in my mind’), is a 24-page masterclass in pace and place. No less memorable is the tale of the Latvian teenager who spends a summer as a sex-chat worker (‘Just one more payday’) to realise her dream of studying abroad.

But try as Judah might to extricate himself from the page, he is there in every line. These are his characters and these are the stories he has sought out. That, of course, is valid: choosing one’s subjects is every writer’s prerogative. Judah pushes the point further. For him, such selection is his analysis. Other Europes exist – those of cultural history, of Brussels politics, of Eurovision optimism. Judah simply turns his gaze on another. And he does it well – for his is a Europe that many experience but which still operates largely in the shadows./>