The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable by Amitav Ghosh

the eminent Indian novelist's 2016 book about literary fiction's failure to address the enormity of climate change and environmental damage

This extended essay is both huge in scope - giving detailed attention to topics from the Victorian view of nature as reflected in Madame Bovary to the Chinese industrial revolution of the 11th century, to the forecast effects of sea-level rise on Mumbai and New York - and very narrow in its ultimate focus, which is the culture of "literary fiction", i.e. the Booker-and-broadsheet-review sort, more so than the experimental oddities popular in vocal circles of GR. If you enjoy seeing the results of a polymathic mind at work - even if you aren't especially into books about environmental issues and/or have reservations about litfic - this would be a satisfying novella-length read.

Literary Fiction
Last year, I became frustrated whilst involved in frequent discussion about litfic, how utterly separate it seemed from the topic I was reading most about in non-fiction, climate change. (And Richard Powers' reported novel-in-progress, about trees, was nowhere near publication.) So this book came along at just the right time. However, because Ghosh is himself so enmeshed in the litfic fraternity, he doesn't have, or rather doesn't transmit, a sense of how small a field it is in sales and readership terms, or in the eyes of the many readers who have other preferences, and oddly never even alludes (for his focus on literary is implicitly related to cultural prestige) never alludes to the more experimental and highbrow, as if litfic were the apex and not seen as a dull middlebrow by some who prefer more obscure or trashier works, or both. (On Goodreads, various readers of experimental fiction mingle in the best-reviewer rankings with readers of popular genre novels; litfic has always seemed to less prominent on here and more the province of the newspapers).

I also thought he neglected to address the partisanship, over a century old, about political and issue-led fiction versus the aesthetic, artistic and amusing. (There are frequent skirmishes over the topic on Goodreads, framing it as an either/or; a false dichotomy in my view, many of the most interesting novels managing to incorporate both.) However, it was refreshing that Ghosh did not delineate everything in the same old terms - because he is calling for both more realism about the issue of climate change in literary fiction and for greater attention to the fantastical and non-human, as is found in folktales from times when human life was more directly subject to nature. It felt as invigorating as a new paradigm. But because his argument is quite subtle, it could quite easily read to the art-for-art's sake team as entirely a denigration of their viewpoint. That isn't helped by his rather sweeping, example-free statements about Modernism and its focus on language and human internality, and less on politics, as being even more pronounced than those of recent litfic. These rang hollow to me because, since I became aware of Ghosh's book nearly a year ago, by far the best example of serious fiction I've read which fulfils its suggested remit is the section 'Time Passes' in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, in which a holiday home is abandoned for years, encroached upon by animals and plants, whilst its upper-class intellectual owners are affected by the First World War. It shows that the experimental may be an easier place to introduce the non-human and the slipperiness of a material reality once assumed to be secure than is yet another realist novel about infidelity in Hampstead.

For the benefit of those who view issues in fiction as oppositional to aesthetics, Ghosh could have emphasised more that contemporary literary fiction frequently features other sociopolitical topics, especially class and wealth divisions between people, and experiences of war, but that climate change, and nature as a force to which humans are subject (other than via common serious diseases such as cancer) is distinctively missing. (A point which, as I read The Great Derangement, I realised was the source of my frustration mentioned above.) Experimental fiction may be less inclined to foreground "issues", but they are often present in the background, perhaps in characters' living conditions.

Yet when one is hanging out in [online] crowds in which literary fiction is the favoured form, Ghosh's critique of its neglect of a major issue of our time and of imminent times, and especially of how this indicts its claim to seriousness when other topics are addressed over and over, is absolutely relevant; I wanted to nag some people to read this book even before I'd looked at anything more than the Amazon preview.

A common response to mentioning the lack of reference to climate change in litfic - whether among people I know, or among BTL Guardian commenters - is to just read SF instead FFS. (Here is a good recent article about climate change in fiction including SF.) The neglect of the issue is seen by some friends as merely one symptom of litfic's backwaterish irrelevancy and dullness outside the newspapers-and-prizes merry-go-round. It is indeed a form with a far smaller audience and a diminishing contribution to the wider cultural conversation compared with what it had in, for example, the 1950s and 1960s. Its genre-snobbishness (although this I see far more among GR hardcore-experimentalist circles now, as litfic readers, writers and critics who grew up on comics hit their 40s and gain significant influence) looks particularly archaic and ridiculous when compared with film. Among cineastes, it's form and presentation that counts towards respect, no topics circumscribed, and there is plenty of arthouse SF. (Perhaps proportionally more than experimental speculative fiction in book form?) Yet literary fiction does still count as both measure of and signal to what does or should really matter to the broadsheet-inclined audience, which includes the political classes and other significant decision makers. If Ghosh thinks the near-absence of climate change in literary fiction is symptomatic of society's unwillingness to face up to the future and the effects of its own actions - noting that future settings are as uncharacteristic of litfic, just as much as historical fiction is a staple of prize longlists - I would say that, as other forms have addressed it more, it is perhaps more related to the neglect of it, and to general short-termism and unwillingness to seriously contemplate what will happen, among the comfortable chattering classes. (My view may be skewed because, over the past year, I have returned to reading more about the environment than I had for over a decade, but it does seem as if there are more serious stories getting more public attention now than there used to be, even a couple of years ago.) Ghosh notes that in 2015, two highly significant international documents about climate change appeared: the Paris Agreement, and the papal encyclical Laudato si' - whilst the Booker longlist was entirely devoid of the subject. (I would argue that the following year's [book:The North Water|25666046], however, does address human despoliation of the environment in a historical setting.) Anna's excellent review of this book explains other reasons why literary fiction matters specifically in covering this topic, including its artistic approach.

Ghosh sees the situation of "serious fiction" as flowing from Enlightenment and C19th views of nature, in which nature was (surprisingly to us now) seen as stable, ordered and subject to only gradual change. (An opposition of catastrophism versus gradualism, in which the former was seen as primitive, existed in geology from Lyell's time, and was still around among 1980s doubters of the asteroid theory of dinosaur extinction.) This sense of stability in nature mirrored the increasing stability of western bourgeois life as industrial society grew up and medicine advanced, such stable lives being seen as ideal subject matter: Emma Bovary's love of melodramatic romances and foolish rejection such stability, being quoted in support. (However, this idea was there in the novel at least a couple of hundred years earlier, with Don Quixote, written when modernity was emerging, but life (including Cervantes' own) was still highly turbulent. Is that because it's a bourgeois idea? Because a certain leaning towards the 'prosaic' is inherent in the novel?) And given the reservations many people I know have about the middlebrow, middle-classness of literary fiction, this aspect of the critique, of the subgenre being too concerned with stable bourgeouis life, was an easy sell.

Between 2012-2016, when the online social justice movement was at its height, among my frustrations with it was the total neglect of environmental issues in favour of aggressive minutiae of identity politics. Ghosh agrees; however, he seems not to have noticed that the idea of 'speciesism' was, recently, slowly gaining ground in some quarters of it, and the way this ties in with the rise of veganism. (As a Guardian reader, my current impression from the paper is that about 30-40% of people are now vegan, not, what, 1-2%... that's how prominent it's becoming. And that another 10% are trying obsessively to avoid buying plastic.) One of the book's big questions - how will people in a future, climate-changed world view literature of the C20th and early C21st? - parallels the social-justice reading of older fiction. Assuming that book distribution, leisure time and literature study are still as plentiful as today (I really don't think it will be in 150 years, and probably sooner), I would think that, as with slavery and casual racism and sexism in books from our past, some readers will see resource profligacy and obliviousness to this to be defining features of these novels, reasons why they should be consigned to the sidelines, whereas many others will see them as unfortunate, with plenty else to enjoy in the stories regardless. (And surely some will wish they were living in times of such everyday luxury - a decadence cult.)


Asia & Climate Change
Ghosh critiques the idea that Asian countries are entirely [future] victims of climate change, in a complex argument. He mentions that western environmentalists, such as Naomi Klein, neglect to mention imperialism as a cause of climate change alongside capitalism itself. Or rather, of the particular patterns of climate change which are occurring now. Essentially, he considers that imperialism may have delayed significant climate change, but that colonial powers are still significantly responsible for global environmental changes as they are experienced.

Major Asian countries had industrial expansions and extractive industries that are little known to the average Westerner. I managed to do a whole history degree - albeit not very recently - without having heard of the Chinese industrial revolution of the C11th; it led to significant deforestation and, once coal was discovered, its adoption as a fuel in some areas. However, as the deposits were not very accessible with medieval technology, topography meant that large-scale fossil-fuel based indistrialisation didn't begin in medieval China, and instead had to wait until Europeans started it in the C18th.
Most accounts of the history of oil trace its initial drilling to the C19th USA; however, many countries used oil on a smal scale where local deposits (little understood) were available; and the Burmese had been using oil with the widest-spread trading network Ghosh suggests that nineteenth century Burma would have been the world's first petrostate if it had not been crushed by British colonial wars. India, for a while, developed a formidable shipbuilding industry and copied British-built steamships. However, the Empire stymied this by banning Indian-built ships from its ports. So, had history progressed only slightly differently, global industry would have had rather a different distribution - and carbon emissions would have been much higher, much earlier. (Ghosh considers there to have been two significant eras for emissions: the West in the early twentieth century, and Asia in the 1980s onwards, the latter although it was not so densely industrialised, had a huge impact due to sheer human numbers.)

A signficant difference from the West was that in major Asian countries, there was always greater opposition to industrialisation from religion (Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism) and from public intellectuals. Nineteenth century novels may sometimes lament the coming of the railways and the changes they wrought to the countryside, but no-one truly influential spoke up against industrialisation itself as opposed to, say, conditions in factories. However, as colonial powers packed up and went home, political leaders became keen to start trying to catch up with the West; Gandhi, before his assassination, was accused of trying to hold India back - and Chinese Communism pushed religious belief to one side in favour of punishing regimes of agricultural and industrial progress.

Ghosh considers that on balance, the West still owes the rest of the world, including Asia, for damage wrought by climate change, but that Asia in particular is not purely a victim.

A Dystopian Future
Ghosh has a particularly gloomy view of the future. (Is that why he's frustratingly blase about the issue of individual action versus collective action, assuming they are an either/or, and that readers aren't going to be rolling their eyes at his international arts lifestyle living - and evidently flyinh quite frequently between - New York and India? I posted more about this subject here.)

The outright collapsitarian vision - whilst alarming to some - has a strong element of freedom to it, and for physically tough people with certain viewpoints, it may even be invigorating. But the world envisaged here, dominated by the politics of the armed lifeboat has no such primitivist, libertarian appeal. Delineating plausible and pessimistic reasoning for military planners' careful study of climate change, he considers how climate change and the instability it will wreak to be an excuse for increasing authoritarian militarisation, especially of countries that are likely destinations for millions of refugees from regions stricken by famine and unbearable heat. The countries where the refugees originate may, in turn, have punitive policies of their own, introduced to appease Western powers. The poor everywhere, but especially those in the Global South, end up worse off than ever. (I think this increased authoritarianism is, very sadly, more plausible in densely populated countries like Britain, whereas the US is more spread out and contains many recalcitrant armed citizens - it does seem more likely to fragment and collapse.) There even appears to be an implication that some actors in the deep state may not want to do much to mitigate climate change, precisely because they see global turbulence as an opportunity to strengthen their stranglehold, which is considerably more depressing than, as usual, assuming they only care about making money in the short term. Ghosh tries to end the book on a sudden hopeful note, that current youngsters and the literature they have yet to write, may help to create a better world than that. He also has high hopes for world religions becoming ready-made pressure groups for lowering carbon emissions (no mention of the Catholic neglect of population as an issue). I was reminded of Mark Lynas' Six Degrees and his description of the illogically optimistic conclusions many authors add to their environmental books because they feel they should. With a little more creative vision, and more words, that conclusion could have sounded more convincing and inspiring to action - as otherwise it doesn't sound like Amitav Ghosh wants to join Dark Mountain just yet.

There may be a few flaws in this book, but it's an original and interesting melange of topics. The issue it addresses with literary fiction may seem minor to some - especially those who don't read much litfic - but some of us, at least, had been frustrated by it already. Ghosh is saying something that needed to be said: how can this subgenre claim such seriousness and weight and relevance when it has its head in the sand? However, will many dedicated readers of literary fiction actually take a break from novels to read this critique?


(read and reviewed July 2017; the review, comment thread - and dozens of quotes and status updates - on Goodreads.)

Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald

So it turned out that I was going to get round to reading more Sebald (after Austerlitz, over three years ago), and it was going to be this one. And, unlike Austerlitz, which is incontrovertibly a novel, to read this was to experience the ur-text of what's meant by Sebaldian: vast, controlled digression, the lists, the descriptions, melancholic polymathic butterfly flitting from global to local history; travel writing, memoir, nature, biography (especially of fellow eccentrics with diverse interests: he begins and ends with Sir Thomas Browne). Not long ago I watched the film Patience (After Sebald) and in it, I think it was Christopher Maclehose recounting a conversation with Sebald, during which they discussed which topic categories his book would be given in publishing databases, and WGS said "I want all the categories!"

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 stare at the screen for untold hours get this written first, and it became a goal beyond reason to manage it; I know there's no real necessity for anyone in the world that this piece of writing exists on a GR server. I still can't think of a conclusion because the procrastination imp in my head isn't having it, and you probably know by now whether you're interested in this book, if you didn't already, so I'll just leave it here for now.]

(read & reviewed March 2017;