I had such high hopes for Nicholas Jubber’s “Epic Continent: Adventures in the Great Stories of Europe”. The title sounds good, the cover artwork was tasteful and it is about the epic poems of Europe. So far, so good.
Alarm bells started during the introduction though and by the end of the first chapter this promising book had become my new favourite thing to hate. Awful does not even begin to describe what this book and Jubber represent. He is the perfect example of the midwit intellectuals pushed out by the system today and we’re going to dismantle it and them.
Jubber’s prologue lays out his virtue signaling luxury beliefs. He’s on holiday in Europe with his family and the unthinkable happens. Brexit. He’s torn asunder by this and then thinking about something he embarks on this book. At this stage we have some warning about what might be coming but he seems invested in the power and myth of the European epics but all this is dashed in the first chapter.
We aren’t even on the second page and this ‘intellectual’ is meeting with the invaders of Europe. The ‘refugees’. This is where we see the idiocy of what Oxford churns out - the Odyssey is vehicle for masturbatory sympathy for refugees. Let’s take a look at the kind of analysis that Jubber is capable of:
To be a refugee is to be unwanted, an exile, suspected by the authorities and the locals, and worst of all by those around you; like Odysseus, returning to Ithaca in disguise, 'a brazen, shameless beggar’ in the words of the suitor Antinous. Another pedlar accosts him and, egged on by the suitors, they end up wrestling for the prize of a sizzling hot goat sausage.
This beggars belief. Odysseus is the one RETURNING HOME. The refugee is invading. The refuge is the newcomer, the suitor. The refugees the suitors, they are in our homes unwanted they are proposing to our women, unwanted. The fact Jubber attempts to flip the script on this is beyond shocking, this is the realm of lunacy and ideology.
The Odyssey is rife with fugitives, outsiders wandering in from elsewhere. Reading of the kindliness towards the dispossessed shown by Odysseus' son, Telemachus, who harbours a fugitive on his ship without expectation of reward, or the swineherd Eumaeus, who hosts a penniless tramp (his master in disguise) and tells him the poignant tale of his own enslavement, one suspects the poet understood something about the pain of dispersal.
Again the pathetic childishness of Jubber is on display here. Almost any culture, not just European, preaches about kindness to travelers. This is not some call to arms from Homer in the distant past to all hundreds of thousands of military age males into our countries.
It gets worse and even more paper thin:
Once, during an intermediate English class, I narrated the plot of the Odyssey to a young Afghan student. "That sounds like my journey, she said, with a wry smile. It wasn't part of her cultural inheritance, but she could see the echoes. More voluble was a project class, in which we read an adaptation from the Odyssey alongside Bob Dylan's Rolling Stone: two tales of wandering souls.
To my surprise, it was Homer and not the Dylan classic who got the students talking.
"This is about something; said a student called Nouri. 'This person has a difficult experience, but he tries to survive. I can understand this.'"
Just unbelievable. A young Afghan woman upon hearing a story of traveling hardship is able to relate - just stunning stuff here. I mean it really makes you think of the depth Jubber is going to and then he follows it up with the last lines from another invader that amount to : Bad things are relatable to bad things.
This is just paper thin 5th grade level comparative analysis. I don’t even have to waste more words insulting Jubber. He does it himself - his attempt to compress the epic of The Odyssey and all the myriad of lessons we could take into the most basic “it was difficult travel” is enough. We have to remember he is writing to an audience and this audience is also dumb enough to think this moving - the majority of this first chapter was just emotional manipulation. He was at more pains to portray and talk about the invading ‘refugees’ than to discuss the Odyssey.
The final nail in the coffin for Jubber is this passage where he reveals his pathetic ideological world view.
If ever there was purpose to political union in Europe, surely this was it: to find an organised way for a well-off continent of so million to absorb a population increase of just 0.3 per cent. But European leaders had been swinging more wildly than the Olympian gods, allowing domestic survival to suppress the more urgent task of pan-European policy making. Hungary had built a razor-wire fence, Angela Merkel had U-turned on her refugee policy and British Eurosceptics had distributed posters of immigrant 'swarms' to drive the vote for Brexit.
Jubber is basically just writing the long form pseudo-intellectual nonsense that readers of The Guardian salivate over. It is the picture a dying child being used to justify the complete destruction of your society and way of life, and all the while they call you a bigot and racist for resisting the invasion.
Jubber and his ilk are a plague across our society. They are stupid and ugly and evil. Anyone with a modicum of intelligence would realize how paper thin his analysis is, how weak and utterly ideologically driven his world view is. For all his supposed love of Europe and the epic poems he can’t break out of a paper bag. I gave up on this book - much as I have given up on anything produced in the last 20 years. It’s nonsense and ideological drivel produced for a midwit generation, only though our own organizations and publishing houses will we turn things around.
Sad that this book was created, but at least there’s some humour in the travesty of it all! What a dope