The Rings of Saturn by WG Sebald – walking through history

Riffing on a melancholy trip along the Suffolk coast, this book expands into a grand meditation on the past
Read more Guardian writers’ Journeys in literature

This spring I went to Southwold for the first time. I went with my parents and during the journey there was some discussion as to why I hadn’t been before. Their home (my old one) is in Norwich, roughly a 45-minute drive from the Suffolk coastal town, and the two of them visit often. Surely I must have gone too, they said, if only just the once? Perhaps I had been and simply forgotten about it, after all it wouldn’t have been the first time.

It’s true that memory is not my strongest suit, but still I disputed my parents’ assertion. I may forget people’s names in the middle of a conversation, appointments made only recently and on one occasion even my PIN number, but I don’t forget trips. And I certainly don’t forget trips to destinations where I would have been in line for a free lunch. Southwold was very much such a destination.

I tell this story only partly to show how obnoxious I was as a youth. More importantly I tell it because only weeks after first visiting Southwold – and by sheer coincidence – I read WG Sebald’s Rings of Saturn. A transcendent piece of psychogeographic writing, it’s a book built from observations made on the very same Suffolk terrain, during a walk down the coast from Lowestoft to Ditchingham. Along the way, Sebald spend two days in Southwold, a spell that prompts a mental journey into the history of colonial exploitation in the Congo and the links between Joseph Conrad and English knight, Irish nationalist and, ultimately, British traitor, Roger Casement.

Elsewhere, Sebald brings other historical personages to life. He recounts the reign of the Empress Dowager Tzu-hsi who presided over China for 47 years (despite never officially being its ruler). He pieces together the social ascent of Victorian entrepreneur Sir Morton Peto. He delves into the lives and works of writers from Thomas Browne to Swinburne and Chateaubriand. Sebald’s fascination extends beyond the individual to broader human activity; he explores the history of herring fishing in northern Europe and explains how submerged land off Dunwich was once one of the most important ports in Europe.

All of these disparate studies are woven together exuberantly, with a structural flair redolent of high modernism but which still allows for moments of magical happenstance (a seaman and chronicler of colonial horrors, Joseph Conrad also first learned English in … Lowestoft). It’s also a magnificent feat of memory – highly galling for me – describing in minute detail, for example, the desolate quiet of the marshes of Orfordness.

Most of all, The Rings of Saturn is a triumph of tone; a synchronisation of events, environment and memory with the writer’s mood. And despite Sebald’s ravenous curiosity about the world around him, that mood is miserable. First published in German in 1995, two years after he had been confined to hospital by a back injury (an episode he recalls in the book), it has the feel of a man trying to capture thoughts and feelings before he passes. Sebald actually died in a car crash six years later, at the age of 57. Described by the Times as “the Joyce of the 21st century”, he only survived a year of it.

The certitude with which Sebald writes about man’s flaws, his rapacity and self-involvement, is both chilling and convincing. In his ponderings on humanity’s exploitation of the environment he foresees exactly the issues that are beginning to bite on us today: the despoliation of natural habitat, the decimation of food stocks (those herrings again), the pollution of air and water.

One passage in particular stuck with me:

Our spread over the earth was fuelled by reducing the higher species of vegetation to charcoal, by incessantly burning whatever would burn. Combustion is the hidden principle behind every artefact we create. The making of a fish hook, manufacture of a china cup, or production of a television programme, all depend on the same process of combustion. Like our bodies and like our desires, the machines we have devised are possessed of a heart which is slowly reduced to embers.

It’s at this point I have to confess that the past 12 months have been a year of my own miserable thinking. Perhaps that’s why I disappeared so readily into The Rings of Saturn. But rather than reinforcing my mood, I found solace in Sebald’s. It may be despondent and worn down but it is not cynical, it is not blind to beauty and, at its heart, it carries an invigorating dedication to truth. All of which should perhaps inspire me to establish whether I really did go to Southwold when I was young and, if I did, what the food was like.

This article was amended on 14 August 2015 to correct the publication date of the novel. Rings of Saturn was published in 1995 in German and 1998 in English, not 1992 as previously stated.

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaJqfpLi0e8GopqSrkqG8qHuRaWhuZ5GqtHB9kmiroZ1dp7avs9Jmpp9lo5bBtr7NZpmyZaecerSxwZqjnWWnlrmstc2gZK2goqTCqLSMoaCsrJ%2Bnxg%3D%3D