[In the following review, Brady praises Sebald's use of vivid imagination and haunting evocation of memory in The Emigrants.]

In an essay first published in 1927 and entitled “Photography”, Siegfried Kracauer, one of a group of cultural critics—it included Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht—who were looking for meanings below the surface appearance of photographs, scrutinizes an old, faded photograph of his grandmother. He reflects on what he calls the “demonic ambiguity” of old photographs, the tension between an opaqueness “which scarcely a ray of light can penetrate” and a transparence that can increase “to the extent that insights thin out the vegetation of the soul”. And behind the ambiguity, he finds something unsettling: photographs fail in their “attempt to banish the recollection of death”. While Kracauer muses, letting a photograph generate ideas, the German writer, W. G. Sebald uses photographs as narrative material. In The Emigrants, they function as key memorabilia in a complex recovery of four personal histories. The result is a striking mixture of fact, alleged fact, and fantasy, punctuated by often hazy, artless snapshots. It has much of the ambiguity that Kracauer found so arresting and it has a great deal of the “recollection of death” that the photographic image and indeed other modes of retrieval fail to banish.

Sebald, educated in Germany but living for over a quarter of a century in England, is himself an emigrant. A succession of works—poems in the late 1980s, three prose works since 1990—have been enthusiastically received in German-speaking countries. There have been narrative poems, modern in their avoidance of “poetic” gesturing, unmodern perhaps in their attention to historical detail. These have included a long exploration of the life of a mid-eighteenth-century German theologian-turned-scientist who joined the nightmare expedition of Vitus Bering; a scrutiny that is both atmospheric and meticulously observant of the world of the painter, Grünewald; a journey to Manchester with its “wasted elysian fields” and its “dead mythic rivers” and a wrecked Heldentenor singing Wagner in Liston's Music Hall. And there have been three prose narratives: first, in 1990, Schwindel, Gefuhle, an intricate linked sequence of four narratives in which history—Stendhal and Kafka in Italy, recent serial killings in Verona, Sebald in his German birthplace—is overlaid with visions (Dante glimpsed in Vienna, King Ludwig II of Bavaria in Venice) and with the confusions and the changing moods of a narrator. That narrator is clearly Sebald himself, who shifts in and out of focus as he meanders in haunted fashion in Vienna and Venice, loses a passport in Italy or ferrets out with unnerving persistence a multitude of private worlds in his own South German birthplace. In his third and most recent book, Die Ringe des Saturn—Eine englische Wallfahrt (The Rings of Saturn—an English Pilgrimage, 1991), Sebald is more unswervingly at the centre of a journey through Suffolk, through physical landscapes which mesmerize and inspire him, through mental landscapes peopled by Roger Casement, Sir Thomas Browne, and embracing dreams, recollections of the silk-industry in Germany and Italy and a multitude of fascinating, deftly negotiated twists and turns out from Suffolk into a rich past and a wider world.

The Emigrants, the second of Sebald's three narratives and the first to be translated into English, is in more than a convenient chronological sense half way between the elusively centred Schwindel, Gefuhle and the more linear structure of Die Ringe des Saturn; between, as the titles suggest, vertiginous feelings on the one hand and a pilgrimage on the other. Its four parts concern four distinct figures, connected not only by their shared, if richly varied emigrant status but also by their links with Sebald: an old doctor outside Norwich from whom he rents a flat; a childhood teacher whose death is reported; a great-uncle seen only once but part of a rediscovered network of relatives; a painter hidden away in Manchester where Sebald first lived in the first phase of his emigration. All four have variously withdrawn. The doctor counts the blades of grass on his lawn; the teacher is reported to have spent hours “gazing at the greenery that burgeoned all around”, as he went blind, “soon all he could see were fragmented and shattered images”; the great uncle ends his days “waiting for the butterfly man” (Nabokov is a ghostly presence more than once) and attended by a doctor whose self-characterization could stand for all Sebald's figures: “I no longer concern myself with what goes on in the so-called real world. No doubt I am now, in some sense, mad; but, as you may know, these things are merely a question of perspective.” Max Ferber, the painter in Manchester, is the closest that Sebald comes to a familiar species of emigrant—he is the son of deported Jewish parents whose deaths he discovers only much later. He too has withdrawn into “self-imposed seclusion”.

All four emigrants end wretchedly; two kill themselves, two waste away. Personal tragedies are reconstructed through surviving records—diaries and jottings, the recollections of others—but above all by Sebald's blend of empathy, distance and imagination. Shadowy figures emerge from their obscure private worlds to become vivid, memorable, three-dimensional characters, and yet Sebald's business is more than character-portrayal. The rejoining of scattered remains is a fraught matter—and an endlessly fascinating one—because memory cannot be steered and kept on course, and because the past invades uncontrollably. When, for example, Sebald himself walks around Manchester he is “frightened to death” by seagulls rushing off a high building; he sees—very sharply—what is around him, but is distracted by memory:

the sight of the Ordsall slaughterhouse absurdly brought to my mind the name of Baeberlin & Metzger, the Nuremberg Lebkuchen makers; whereupon that name promptly stuck in my head, a bad joke of sorts, and continued to knock about there for the rest of the day.

That kind of disruptive recollection is a part of the narrative of The Emigrants because, for all its waywardness, it has its own kind of authenticity. It is a part of the record. And dreams are another part. Ferber, he tells Sebald, dreamt once (“he could not say whether by day or by night”) of opening the Trafford Park Exhibition in 1887 with Queen Victoria—“hand in hand with the fat Queen who gave off an unsavoury odour”. They passed through a trompe-l'oeil door into Ferber's parents' drawing-room. At this point, Sebald inserts a photograph of an ornate Victorian drawing-room, using the photograph to redirect a circuitous act of recollection. Dreams and hard facts interact; retracing his dead great-uncle, Sebald travels to Deauville, and there he dreams of arriving in 1913 at Le Havre in an ocean steamer, listing a vast number of aristocrats who flit through his dream. But the dream is preceded by his own observations, in 1991, of an undreamed Deauville, whose atmosphere is rooted in things seen (and recaptured, moreover, in Michael Hulse's resourceful and sensitive translation). It is a place where closed window shutters

will open slightly, and a hand will appear and shake out a duster, fearfully slowly, so that one inevitably concludes that the whole of Deauville consists of gloomy interiors where womenfolk, condemned to perpetual invisibility and eternal dusting, move soundlessly about, waiting for the moment when they can signal with their dusters to some passer-by. …

Where records fail, people are silent or dreams are missing, the imagination takes over. Sebald's old schoolmaster, unheard of for years, kills himself by lying down on a railway track. Nobody was there:

I imagined him skating in winter, alone on the fish ponds at Moosbach; and I imagined him stretched out on the track. As I pictured him, he had taken off his spectacles and put them on the ballast stones by his side. The gleaming bands of steel, the crossbars of the sleepers, the spruce trees on the hillside above the village of Altstadten, the arc of the mountains he knew so well, were a blur before his short-sighted eyes, smudged out in the gathering dusk.

Yet—a further twist—even that kind of imagining can be a “wrongful trespass”.

In his autobiography, Nabokov sees memory as a “robust reality” that “makes a ghost of the present”. The realities that Sebald uncovers are rarely “robust”. Memory can indeed, as his great-uncle's diary puts it, be destabilizing: “Memory”, he added in a postscript, “often strikes me as a kind of dumbness. It makes one's head heavy and giddy.” The giddiness is there, beautifully held in check. But there's no sign of dumbness in Sebald's multitude of moods and voices. Memory—if it is one single thing at all—is a kind of eloquence.