[In the following review, Stow offers favorable comments on what he considers Sebald's mournful tone and unique narrative style in The Rings of Saturn.]

W. G. Sebald, Professor of German at the University of East Anglia, has lived in that region since 1970, but was born in 1944, in what was left of Nazi Germany. The Rings of Saturn is his second work to appear in English, having been preceded by The Emigrants, a book whose haunting qualities have been saluted by critics as diverse as A. S. Byatt and Tariq Ali.

Both volumes are described by the publisher as “works of fiction”, an unexpected categorization in view of their contents. The narrator of The Rings of Saturn is certainly a man called Sebald, since he regards “the holy prince of heaven Saint Sebolt”, another restless and self-dissatisfied man, as his patron. We even have a blurred snapshot of him, at Ditchingham Park, against a cedar of Lebanon which was (probably) destroyed in the hurricane of October 1987. So far as one can tell, no detail of the narrator's experience has been invented. Did he, then, one wonders, instruct his publishers to call his books fiction? Is this a comment on the fabricative powers of memory? Do Chateaubriand's Mémoires d'outre-tombe, to some extent Sebald's model, also deserve this label?

Probably they do. When Sebald writes of Chateaubriand's youthful romance with the vicar's daughter of Ilketshall St Margaret in Suffolk, he must fabricate a little in order to understand. And Chateaubriand himself, though a distruster of memory (“memories … in some strange way blind us to life”), must tread the same path, otherwise “our existence would be a mere never-ending chain of meaningless moments”. The recording of memory, however “humiliating” and “contemptible”, is an act of salvaging, preceding the all-engulfing shipwreck.

Sebald, in his act of recording, has some hope of a therapeutic outcome. The short walking-tour of Suffolk which provides his book's framework was begun in the August dog days of 1992, to counteract the flatness felt after a long stint of work. “A year to the day after I began my tour, I was taken into hospital in Norwich in a state of total immobility.” He attributes that breakdown in part to the feelings of desolation aroused, “even in that remote place”, by “traces of destruction reaching far back into the past”. In 1992, there are already signs of disturbance. Puzzled by bewildering tracks through the heath at Minsmere, he seems to suffer a temporary memory loss, or fugue. From Orford Ness, surrounded by reminders of the twentieth century's scientific horrors, he has a vision of Orford's vanished windmills, which may or may not be an actual hallucination. Phrases like “I do not know how long …” are frequent.

Those words have a flavour of another age; a flavour which is one of Sebald's most marked characteristics. The style, while it records much that is distressing, is always, in itself, decorous and reassuring. The tone has been caught, with perfect tact, by Michael Hulse, who has also translated Goethe's Werther and Wassermann's Caspar Hauser. Some lines on a dead friend of Sebald's suggest that almost archaic quality.

Michael was in his late forties, a bachelor, and, I believe, one of the most innocent people I have ever met. … He was remarkable for the modesty of his needs, which some considered bordered on eccentricity. … Year in, year out, as long as I knew him, he wore either a navy blue or a rust coloured jacket, and if the cuffs were frayed or the elbows threadbare he would sew on leather trims or patches. … In the summer vacations, Michael would make long walking tours of the Valais and the area around Lake Geneva, in connection with his Ramuz studies, and sometimes in the Jura or the Cévennes. … But then without warning last May Michael, who had not been seen for some days, was found dead in his bed, lying on his side and already quite rigid, his face curiously mottled with red blotches. The inquest found that he had died of unknown causes, a verdict to which I added the words, in the deep and dark hours of the night.

No Edwardian academic would have done any sewing for himself; but, that apart, we seem to be looking at a typical example of those walking-touring bachelor scholars who people the ghost stories of M. R. James. It is this unflappable style which creates the unity of Sebald's highly complex “narrative”, which works by association, and takes off for faraway places at the drop of an image. Chapter Eight will serve as an example.

At his Southwold hotel, Sebald falls into conversation with a rich Dutchman, who draws his attention to the link between art galleries and sugar money (see the Mauritshuis and the Tate). He then goes to Woodbridge, where he considers the life and work of Edward FitzGerald. In a creaking old pub that night, he has a dream of FitzGerald, which turns into a dream of the Ashburys, for some time his hosts in their crumbling country house at the foot of the Slieve Bloom mountains. In some of his most fascinating pages, Sebald describes the decline of that and other Ascendancy families in and after the Irish Civil War.

He moves on towards Orford, reminded on the way of Victorian nouveaux riches and their conspicuous consumption. In Rendlesham Forest, which was devastated by the 1987 hurricane, he is driven to ground by a sort of sandstorm, from which he emerges with a feeling of post Apocalypse. He remembers some hideous scientific catastrophe which is rumoured to have happened at Shingle Street during the Second World War. A boatman takes him to mysterious Orford Ness, once the sinister preserve of research scientists, now open to those very few members of the public who care to be there. He finds it ugly and oppressive, and on his way back to Orford proper, has a déjà-vu vision of that charming backwater in its prime.

Nowhere does the reader find any sense of dislocation. The style, authoritative and sedate, smoothes all transitions. But implicit in that style is a good deal of pain. The climax (for even a structure as rambling as this can have one) is the hurricane of 1987: an extraordinary experience for everyone in the region. Where I live, the fishermen simply marvelled; the sea, they said, seemed to be boiling. Many strong men and women shed tears over the fate of the trees, already decimated by Dutch elm disease and drought. Sebald's lament for some particular trees, those near his house, is the most heartfelt and moving ever likely to be written about that event. All the raw, dumb shock is still there, as if in the memory of some survivor of Hiroshima.

But ruin is his theme: the destruction, by the sea, of Dunwich in the Middle Ages, and that of “the magic garden of Yuan Ming Yuan near Peking”, by British and French troops, in 1860; the ruination of Irish country-house life, by arson and impoverishment, since 1920; and of the sort of country-house life enjoyed by the new-rich in East Anglia, revolving around the wholesale slaughter of small creatures, by an advance of civilization. Sometimes, as in this last case, the reader is quite glad to see the back of them. And, as for Dunwich, is it not rather pleasurable to look at a map of what is under the North Sea, and then to look at the blank face of the sea itself? The Germans, I believe, have a word for the pleasure of ruins.

One feels that Sebald has not reached, probably will never reach, such a bland acceptance. He seems intransigent in mourning. And yet, he is a reassuring companion. Like Sir Thomas Browne, one of his masters, he has a fund of curious information, and one has absolute confidence in his research, whether he is discussing the North Sea herring fishery or sericulture in England and the world.

Occasionally, I felt that he had missed something. It seems odd to write at length about Joseph Conrad and his connection with Lowestoft, where he first heard English, without quoting his description of the men from whom he heard it (“East Coast chaps each built as though to last forever, and coloured like a Christmas card. Tan and pink—gold hair and blue eyes with that Northern straight-away-there look!”). Odd, too, to write a brief life of Edward FitzGerald without mentioning beloved “Posh”, the fisherman who perhaps exploited his fondness. Since Sebald found himself in Rendlesham Forest (where, according to M. R. James, one of the three gold crowns of East Anglia was dug up in 1687), I should have been interested to hear his thoughts about Staverton Thicks, whose ancient vegetation seems to have held a fascination for the painter John Nash. And Blundeston, of course, was the childhood home of David Copperfield, where he first beheld a certain dressing table, and the “numerous little steel fetters and rivets, with which Miss Murdstone embellished herself when she was dressed”.

A word should be said about Sebald's use of photographs and other illustrations, in this book as in The Emigrants. Most have features about as distinct as those of the “young” Bette Davis at the beginning of Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte. A point is being made, perhaps, about the fallibility of the camera as a recorder; rather, it is an obscure memory-jogger. Such a device is similar to eighteenth-century Grangerism, and strikes one sometimes as slightly comic in its doggedness. Herring-fishing is mentioned, and hey presto, there is a picture of a herring. But if one smiles, it is with the enjoyment of an amiable eccentricity.

If I attempt to sum up Sebald's work, as Englished by Michael Hulse, two adjectives come insistently to mind. One is staid (as to style), and the other is plangent (as to tone). The squaring-up between those two moods has produced a voice of memorable originality. And in the case of The Rings of Saturn, it has also produced a notable addition to the literature of Suffolk.