Myths ancient and modern

Six remarkable stories shape this book. Tracing the trajectories of the Odyssey to the Icelandic Njals Saga, via the Kosovo Cycle of heroic poems, the French Chanson de Roland, the German Nibelunglied and our own home-grown epic Beowulf, Nicholas Jubber’s new work is at once a travel journal, a meditation on the idea — and ideal — of Europe, and an exploration of a pivotal moment in the author’s own past. Following the 2016 referendum, Jubber sets off to the Greek island of Chios, perhaps Homer’s birthplace, and now at the front line of the Mediterranean migrant crisis. After a month volunteering in a refugee camp he works his way west and northwards until he comes to rest on the turf roof of a farmhouse in southern Iceland.

The prose is colourful and vigorous; landscape is frequently described through dynamic verbs and unusual similes. So in Serbia: ‘Fast-moving streams played glissandos on the shallow beds, and precipitous meadows dangled above us, like rags pinned to the sky by their sheep.’ Jubber’s advance from John Murray can’t have been over-generous; he sleeps rough, on trains and in doorways, hoarding his resources like the migrants whose paths so often intersect with his own.

Interwoven with the usual adventures of travel — late-night drinking in smoke-filled bars, quirky conversations, semi-comic mishaps and often terrible weather — is a more profound meditation — indeed much direct reportage — on contemporary and historical ideas of European identity, the notion of homeland and that shining promise of a better life that our continent seems to extend to its neighbours.