The long sentences flower again and again in a way that recalls Proust, and the spectre of Jorge Luis Borges hangs over everything. Gradually we realise ‘how everything is connected across space and time … dates of birth with dates of death, happiness with misfortune, natural history and the history of our industries’. The narrator plods on, the flat coast stretches into the distance and yet earthquakes, suicides, volcanoes and imaginary beasts somehow abound. There is a faintly comical tension between the grand tragedies of history and the insubstantial, almost ghostly moments that comprise ordinary time. Sebald’s narrator has ambled along a cliff, witnessed a couple making love on the beach below, noticed a bridge and visited his ‘favourite haunt’, the Sailors’ Reading Room in Southwold, where he is in the habit of leafing idly through old ship logbooks, while the ‘muffled sound of the sea’ competes with ‘the slight scratching noise made by a (billiard) player priming his cue and the short puff when he blows off the chalk.’ We’re halfway through the book by this stage, and not much has happened in real time. Nominally the account of a long walk, which the narrator once took along the coast of East Anglia, The Rings of Saturn might be better thought of as a sort of post-holocaust Arabian Nights, in which stories open onto stories, in which reminisces, dreams and unreliable historical accounts become entangled in such a way that is difficult, at first, to grasp (as the narrator himself jokingly hints) ‘the hidden, horrific, yet at the same time quite meaningless point of the narrative’.įrom the forlorn English coast we move – tangentially, as a dream moves – through a discussion of Thomas Browne’s missing skull to a description of herring fisheries in the seventeenth century, from there to the relationship between the Polish ship captain Joseph Conrad and the gay Irish activist and poet Roger Casement and then on to an account of the devastation of the Congo, to the Taiping Rebellion and the opening of China.
I still think it’s the best work of fiction I’ve ever read. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn did this for me when I first discovered it a few years ago.
At certain times a book is able to take hold of you in such a way as to direct the angle of your life for a while.
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