At first it seemed like it would be impossible to say anything about Sebald other than to link to the long, nineteenth-century-scholarly strings of topics that makes each chapter title on the contents page, and some quotes to show facets of his style, how these subjects are handled. But soon I realised how remarkably he has been integrated into literary culture over the last twenty years. It first and most strongly struck me in reading his numinous, heightened descriptions of natural phenomena: they reminded me of similar lightning flashes in a friend's writing - a friend who hasn't even read Sebald, albeit plenty of authors probably influenced by him. And Sebald, like DFW, is one of the foundations of the contemporary okaying of digression. Never mind the beginning of "creative non-fiction". There didn't seem anything so very unusual in writing this way, reading it in 2017; permission to go on like that is already assumed. But it would have been revolutionary to encounter twenty years ago. His influence is widely acknowledged in certain literary quarters, but I think it goes wider than supposed; he's almost a transitional figure between the esoteric and highbrow and the literary-mainstream, especially seen as such by those who haven't read him, but he's also present in thousands of essays and reviews and articles online and in newspapers and magazines, by people who may never even have thought of picking up one of his books.
And an appropriately-titled, saturnine creature this one is. There is ample death and melancholy here, alongside the ethereal and intellectual; it is elegantly gothic, but no room for trailing velvet garments on a trek across the countryside; with my hat in my hand and my rucksack over my shoulder, I felt like a journeyman in a century gone by, so out of place that I should not have been surprised if a band of street urchins had come skipping after me or one of Middleton's householders had stepped out upon his threshold to tell me to be on my way.
I don't actually have to mention every major topic in the book, or give it proportionate space. Obviously - because this isn't an eve-of-publication press review - but failure to realise I could ignore bits of it was one of the reasons I've been sitting at this window looking at two paragraphs, typing almost nothing else in it for a week. I'm going to end up concentrating on what I liked best, so overall the post might sound like five stars, when there were distinct reasons for that missing star. A few of those overly-fanciful old-fashioned judgements and effect-cause connections that work great when you're reading and writing outright fantasy, but I do tend to cringe at the silliness when it's couched inside more-or-less realism. (And yes, that includes the bits about what Belgians look like, and rural people and visitors.) And the history: it's part of what people read Sebald for, but there are big chunks of stuff here - about the last days of Imperial China, or the Second World War - which are quite well known already, and by which I'm not sufficiently fascinated to revel in another classic narrative-style rehash. Nor did it increase my interest in Joseph Conrad, though it is rather fascinating that he started teaching himself English using the local newspapers of Lowestoft. It's all quite beautiful, the [silk] web by which these interlock with the other topics - just could have done with fewer pages on them. (It often felt as if he included every possible tangent, but near the end he missed a trick by mentioning Rendlesham Forest's strangeness without going near the whole "British Roswell" business, which would have also connected perfectly with the abandoned defence works at Orfordness.)
Though one feature of the war is retold inventively by a gardener, in that feature of Sebaldian style I'd shorthanded in my head as "said Austerlitz", and which a couple of days before writing this paragraph, I read Christopher Hitchens, in his introduction to an old edition of Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon - found in Arguably - delineate as long and quite grammatical addresses that would be unthinkable in real life...however, in a book the solilioquy is not to be despised as a means of elucidation. (I'm fascinated by the construction of these soliloquies. Did Sebald take notes? Can't imagine him with a dictaphone. Did he later show the subjects and ask them if the rewrite reflected their meaning? I couldn't not.)
There are many more obscure subjects on which I did learn something from The Rings of Saturn. Roger Casement, merely a name mentioned occasionally in the news when I was growing up, and now I can't understand why he isn't a great hero to so many of those who criticise colonialism: someone - a gay man - who had a modicum of power in the Imperial civil service who really did try to do something about the abuses in the Congo, Peru, Colombia and Brazil, and would not be mollified by flattering "promotions" to other locations or appeased by a knighthood, whose story shows how large a system it was and how difficult it was really to help. As with the story of the Miners' Strike, where I've only realised in adulthood how biased the 1980s BBC take was, a version I'd once absorbed as definitive truth, the saga of Casement's embroilment in the Irish independence movement and downfall reads now like one who had a just cause and laudable motives, even if some of the means might have gone too far at times. Such is the way causes can be portrayed differently by history once they are no longer dangerous hot buttons.
Similiarly, some of the most memorable characters were people who were only marginally familiar. Such as Edward FitzGerald, nineteenth century translator of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, born to a local gentry family, an early vegetarian, who despised his peers' enclosing of the countryside and lived modestly as an eccentric recluse for the rest of his life after the death of the male friend whom, it seemed, he had loved unrequitedly for many years. I last read The Rubaiyat - in FitzGerald's version - in my teens, and after the following, I half long to re-read it, half fear that it couldn't possibly live up to Sebald's paean: a colloquy with the dead man [the author of the poem, not the friend] and an attempt to bring to us tidings of him. The English verses he devised for the purpose, which radiate with a pure, seemingly unselfconscious beauty, feign an anonymity that disdains even the least claim to authorship, and draw us, word by word, to an invisible point where the mediaeval orient and the fading occident can come together in a way never allowed them by the calamitous course of history.
Another small tragedy of nineteenth-century lost love features Chateaubriand and Charlotte Ives, who could have been together if only French Catholics were able to divorce in the late 18th century. Both examples returned me to the suspicion that people harboured these old loves for so long (and not being against the idea as many modern people are, I've tried it and found it doesn't naturally sustain for more than about three or four years) partly because it was culturally acceptable and normal - one would not be discouraged from it so much or told to get over it - also because there was much less distracting stimulation in the world (in general, but also no films featuring actors and actresses one might crush on as a transitional recovery), and as the population was so much smaller, and with less social moblity, there was a far lower chance of ever again happening on someone else who felt so right.
Other "characters" I'd never heard of before. There were Ashburys, a family of impoverished Anglo-Irish aristocrats stuck in their unsaleable, crumbling home (like the real-life, no-happy-ending version of I Capture the Castle) where Sebald once stayed as a paying guest; I shivered in recognition of how they lived under their roof like refugees who have come through dreadful ordeals and do not now dare to settle in the place where they have ended up. And, like another writer of psychogeographic melange who emerged in the south eastern quadrant of England in the 1990s, Iain Sinclair, Sebald peppers his works with casual mentions of other writers of his acquaintance - spoken of with as much reverence as one might an aged Bloomsbury emeritus - whom I'd never heard of before, feeling as if I was reading a work from some parallel universe. (Or possibly they're the same esoteric crew, shared, and I'd forgotten the names in the years between.) As ever, I wondered if these people were actually famous in corners I didn't know, or whether it was closer to my own esteem for the writing of certain friends who don't put their work forward overmuch, which no-one will convince me isn't vastly better than screeds of stuff that's widely praised, whether by newspaper reviewers or by hundreds or thousands of online Likes and followers.
Perhaps it's inevitable that among the grab-bag of topics infused in Sebald's work, one settles on favourites with which one already has an affinity. Many of mine are about landscape and loss or the passing of time.
Occasionally, the narrative is simply in the present time, with such descriptions of walks as to make one almost gasp in envy. I think you have to have spent hours walking alone in countryside to know what he means; one feels and notices far more intently then, than when distracted by the presence of companions, focused more on maintaining a semblance of symbiosis with them than on the place itself and its effects. No coincidence that most contemporary nature writers walk alone – yet until these became popular I felt it was an unusual thing to do. Some of those writings can feel redundant at times when one can wander on foot and in head oneself - but certain paragraphs of Sebald are so beautiful as to be necessary regardless and in addition; he adds so much:
Beyond the maze, shadows were drifting across the brume of the heath, and then, one by one, the stars came out from the depths of space. Night, the astonishing, the stranger to all that is human, over the mountain-tops mournful and gleaming draws on. It was as though I stood at the topmost point of the earth, where the glittering winter sky is forever unchanging; as though the heath were rigid with frost, and adders, vipers and lizards of transparent ice lay slumbering in their hollows in the sand. From my resting place in the pavilion I gazed out across the heath into the night. And I saw that, to the south, entire headlands had broken off the coast and sunk beneath the waves.
There's so much hidden in this following little paragraph about windmills - even knowing intellectually that Norwich was once England's second biggest city and the region abustle with commerce, the idea seems otherdimensional. It's hard to imagine now, I was once told by someone who could remember the turning sails in his childhood, that the white flecks of the windmills lit up the landscape just as a tiny highlight brings life to a painted eye. And when those bright little points faded, the whole region, so to speak, faded with them.
Dunwich is the central emblem of this awareness of nature and impermanence - as it was a memento mori to the Romantic poets who visited the ruins - and more relevant than ever as the world gradually wakes up to the probable flooding of metropolises as large as New York, never mind Hull, as sea levels gradually rise; it illustrates the pattern by which such things are expected to take place, in fits and starts of storms. The long quote is in comment 1; when Sebald hits his stride, you want to marvel and include everything.
In Dunwich, humans, Canute-like, tried to defy the sea. Another marvellous set-piece of writing (also below) tells of how active destruction, in the form of fire, is indivisible from human civilisation.
And for what terrible triviality they destroy. I very much enjoyed, though never, ever, envied, the author's account of staying in the awful sort of old British three star (?) hotel that proved why Fawlty Towers was closer to documentary than anyone would wish. Certainly these places abounded in the 80s and 90s, but now have perhaps been displaced by Travelodges and the like, whose supermarket homogeneity is simply, sadly, more comfortable than enduring the following:
after hunting pointlessly through the register on the reception desk, handed me a huge room key attached to a wooden pear...
shortly afterwards brought me a fish that had doubtless lain entombed in the deep-freeze for years. The breadcrumb armour-plating of the fish had been partly singed by the grill, and the prongs of my fork bent on it... [actually, this, sans chips, sounds like some of the microwaved suppers I was served at home in my teens] Indeed it was so difficult to penetrate what eventually proved to be nothing but an empty shell that my plate was a hideous mess once the operation was over. The tartare sauce that I had had to squeeze out of a plastic sachet was turned grey by the sooty breadcrumbs, and the fish itself, or what feigned to be fish, lay a sorry wreck among the grass-green peas and the remains of soggy chips that gleamed with fat. I no longer recall how long I sat in that dining room with its gaudy wallpaper
Sebald can occasionally be funny, and food en route is one of the topics that brings out this humour (of the smile rather than LOL variety). I bought a carton of chips at McDonald's, where I felt like a criminal wanted worldwide as I stood at the brightly lit counter, and ate them as I walked back to my hotel. He's so right about the searchlight quality of the brightness of those places... and he, who knows whether deliberately or unwittingly, brings out the absurdity of the guilt every middle-class intellectual must be duty-bound to experience on walking into such a place.
In the film, and I am still searching for this moment, as it's basically impossible to put delicately in any other words apart from those used, without sounding like a petulant teenage vegan, one of the commentators feels that - although, as I discovered, these photos are not beside one another in the book, and nothing is said to this effect in print - Sebald wants us to consider some similiarity between the vast hundred-year old catches of herring and images of slaughter in the Second World War. His accounts of the seemingly limitless abundance of herring plundered to scarcity by earlier twentieth-century fishermen, succeeded by polluted seas and deformed fish, took me back to last year's Booker longlist, with The North Water on early Victorian whaling, and The Many's eerie representation of near-dead Cornish seas; if the latter's author hasn't read Rings of Saturn, I'd be very surprised - though given what I said about how Sebald has permeated the culture...
Humans are destructive fuckers, basically, is what a lot of The Rings of Saturn boils down to, although some individuals also create great beauty. The book's alpha and omega, Thomas Browne, has a melancholy view of human life which might be considered unseemly in a contemporary doctor, but at a time when one more often than not couldn't cure people, merely a bumbling witness to decline and suffering, how could it be anything other than the perceptive realism of experience. As a doctor, who saw disease growing and raging in bodies, he understood mortality better than the flowering of life. To him it seems a miracle that we should last so much as a single day.... The huntsmen are up in America, writes Thomas Browne in The Garden of Cyrus, and they are already past their first sleep in Persia. The shadow of night is drawn like a black veil across the earth, and since almost all creatures, from one meridian to the next, lie down after the sun has set, so, he continues, one might, in following the setting sun, see on our globe nothing but prone bodies, row upon row, as if levelled by the scythe of Saturn—an endless graveyard for a humanity struck by falling sickness.
Returning to the destructiveness of nature itself, one of the most revelatory accounts for me was of the 1987 hurricane. I was a kid living further north at the time and didn't see the extent of destruction in the Home Counties. I was quite disappointed it was nothing more than a big gale, no fun - but Sebald makes it sound heartbreaking in a way I'd never conceived of, and transmits a vivid fear that I'd long since stopped associating with an old worn-out news story. Long quote, again, in comment 1. (Props to Sebald for never once mentioning Michael Fish, ignoring the unwritten law that the blasé weatherman must appear in any account of that night.)
[I've struggled ridiculously to finish this post beyond the first two paragraphs, barely read anything for a week because I felt I ought to
(read & reviewed March 2017;
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