Kelly's Reviews > The Rings of Saturn

This is the third travel memoir I've read* where an author spends time walking around the British Isles and yet, during their journey, seems to spend the majority of their time thinking about somethings, any-things, that are quite different.

When this thought first occurred to me, it made me laugh and think that perhaps Albion should be offended. But, given the books in question and what these literary rambles inspired, I think there really is no choice but to be flattered.

In the early 1990s, Sebald took his walk around the county of Suffolk. Suffolk, just to give you a rough idea, is located in the area of East Anglia. East Anglia is traditionally a somewhat lowly area of the United Kingdom, sometimes used as a byword to indicate backwardness or dreariness, full of flatlands, fens and swamps. Suffolk itself is in the southern half of the region, with a fairly sizable coastal area. It is under constant threat of coastal erosion, with some towns having actually been lost to the sea, many times over. To give you some idea of orientation and general tone:








It is also a rather ancient area of human habitation. It was colonized by the Angles in the reasonably recent Christian era (about the fifth century) but it is also full of archeological finds from the Stone Age, Bronze Age and other eras up to the present. (This is where that famous Anglo-Saxon burial ship with full regal regalia was found, for instance.)

This is, in a way, also what Sebald is up to. His remembrance of his walk through Suffolk is essentially a series of mini-essays, digging up archeological memories from his own mind and the landscape he sees around him, fading in and out of the present sometimes as often as he turns his head for a better view. The subjects of these digressions range from a straightforward history of a formerly glorious manor home he comes across on his first walk, a discussion of Joseph Conrad of Heart of Darkness fame, inspired by the tragic case of Roger Casement, the sad tale of formerly bustling, repeatedly washed out Dunwich, an isolated craftsman working on a famous, minute replica of the Temple at Jerusalem, a sketched portrait of Swinburne and tales of the last days of the Chinese empire. The essay are sometimes analytical in tone, sometimes they take the form of a New Yorker-like story with commentary interspersed, and occasionally we are even offered scenes of drama or fanciful feeling.

Yet despite these different tacks, Sebald's sensibility throughout is that of someone giving a eulogy for things long forgotten. Without ever directly saying so, he shows how the land he walks through is saturated with history, with present and past memory layered loosely on top of each other. Perhaps the best example of this is his exploration of Dunwich. Dunwich, in about the 12th century, was a bustling port with fifty or more churches and a large fleet of fishing and merchant vessels almost perpetually at anchor. Windmills dotted the horizon and shipyards saw to the needs of the ships at anchor. (Sebald notes that a quarter of a large fleet heading to the Crusades, with hundreds of knights and thousands of soldiers, sailed from Dunwich in 1230.) However, the town was built, for some reason best known to the locals, on a cliff. Erosion gradually ate away at the town, taking first some of the churches and then the town in a series of vicious flash floods that began in 1285 and recurred over the course of the next few centuries every few decades or so. The locals first tried to rebuild and then gradually moved their houses farther and farther away from the sea until the port town gradually faded away. Sebald's wandering mind slides from the scenes of repeated, utter disaster to a wide-angle mention of an ongoing trend in human behavior that mirrors that of Dunwich, if for different reasons.

"Little by little the people of Dunwich.. abandoned their hopeless struggle and turned their backs on the sea. Whenever their declining means allowed it, they built to the westward in a protracted flight that went on for generations; the slowly dying town thus followed- by reflex, one might say- one of the fundamental patterns of human behavior. A strikingly large number of our settlements are oriented to the west, and, where circumstances permit, relocate in a westward direction. The east stands for lost causes. Especially at the time when the continent of America was being colonized, it was noticeable that the townships spread to the west even as their eastern districts were falling apart. In Brazil, to this day, whole provinces die down like fires when the land is exhausted by overcropping and new areas to the west are opened up. In North America, too, countless settlements of various kinds, complete with gas stations, motels and shopping malls, move west along the turnpikes, and along that axis, affluence and squalor are unfailingly polarized."

This is indicative of the sort of stream of consciousness-like musings that are typical of Sebald's writing in this volume. Yet the stream, as is often the case with the best writers, is not one way. There are tides that flow in and out, as he returns to the particulars of Dunwich again, taking the time to point out that he is not the first to arrive at the shores of Dunwich and sit down to dream houses and boats and history into being:

"Dunwich, with its towers and many thousand souls, has dissolved into water, sand and thin air. If you look out from the cliff-top across the sea towards where the town must one have been, you can sense the immense power of emptiness. Perhaps it was for this reason that Dunwich became a place of pilgrimage for melancholy poets in the Victorian age."

This becomes both a jumping off point for a descriptive essay on Swinburne, one of these poets, and, I think, perhaps a way for Sebald to analyze his own motives in undertaking a journey similar to men of a very different age, with quite different priorities and sensibilities. What is it that attracted them? stands in for "Why am I here?"

Another, more odd and, in its way, even more haunting version of this, which was personally the most evocative for me, is his encounter with the Ashbury family. In contrast to Dunwich, a place irrevocably battered and forced to change by time, the Ashburys are an example of what happens with the "leftovers" of that change. They are the remnants that somehow slipped through time's loopholes, living a surreal existence that ought, by rights, to have ceased to be possible half a century or more beforehand. The Ashburys live near a chain of mountains in Ireland in a cottage-like, neglected and fading house that has seen better days. The Ashburys took up the legacy of their current house just after the Second World War, an "unsaleable" house formerly belonging to Ireland's ruling classes. The family arrived after the initial Troubles period, but the land was bathed in it, and so were their prospects. Much like the stagnant place itself, the life of the Ashburys, to Sebald's view, "had about it something aimless and meaningless and seemed not so much part of a daily routine as an expression of a deeply engrained distress." Each member of the household has a tale to tell of some enterprise or skill that they have or once had, some idea they once came up with in the era of life when you're supposed to be thinking about what you want to do with yourself, but it seems to always end in "... but then nothing ever came of it." They are like figures who have been captured out of time, unable to move forward, or due to financial means, get out. So they move in a kind of enchanted stasis, repeating traditional motions for no reason at all:

"I do not think that Mrs. Ashbury had any idea what distant fields the seeds she collected might one day fall on, any more than Catherine and her two sisters Clarissa and Christina knew why they spent several hours every day in one of the north-facing rooms, where they had stored great quantities of remnant fabrics, sewing multi-colored pillowcases, counterpanes and similar items. Like giant children under an evil spell, the three unmarried daughters, much of an age, sat on the floor amidst these mountains of material, working away and only rarely breathing a word to each other. The movement they made as they drew the thread sideways and upwards with every stitch reminded me of things that were so far back in the past that I felt my heart sink at the thought of how little time remained."

In Dunwich, Sebald saw some remains of buildings, rocks that may have indicated where settlements once were. But in this case the remains were people. And I think it is most poignant that this family's origins were not in this enchanted world. Mrs. Ashbury married into it long after the first battles were over, her husband would tell her nothing about it, so the little she and her children knew was picked up from legend, rumor, scraps. Then, while trying to work out how to live there and get by, the family slowly turned into one of those scraps themselves. How do we bathe ourselves in the past and not get caught by the spiderweb, the way the Ashburys did?

A few other essays follow these themes- looking out into bare flatlands and seeing the ghosts of what has been, exploring why it is no more. Yet he is careful not to let his sense of elegy and need to bear witness to a past that is still to some degree present slide fully into sentimentality for 'the past' as such. He balances his visions of Dunwich port and decaying Victorian homes with fiery tales of figures like Roger Casement, a shamefully disregarded civil servant of the imperial era who famously stood up for various "native" groups in areas the empire was occupying, from Africa to Ireland. His later description of the violence that accompanied the shift to Home Rule for Ireland is scarcely less fierce-eyed, and it doesn't once give any indication of being distracted by the mysticism that seems to often afflict writers approaching Irish history.

But he is not simply a storyteller or a detached analytic looking at people and locations under the microscope and connecting threads. Sometimes Sebald is overwhelmed by what he is seeing as well, and that is where the fanciful feeling I mentioned earlier comes out. There are plenty of moments of stillness where Sebald weaves his imagination through what he sees, embroidering what he experiences so it is lifted it out of quotidian worries like flies in the marshlands and cold in your feet and into the realm of dreams:

"Time and again, vast dust clouds drifted through Flaubert's dreams by day and by night, raised over the arid plains of Africa and moving north across the Mediterranean and the Iberian peninsula till they settled like ash from a fire on the Tuileries gardens, a suburb of Rouen or a country town in Normandy... In a grain of sand in the hem of Emma Bovary's winter gown, said Janine, Flaubert saw the whole of the Sahara."

"I watched the shadow of our plan hastening below us across hedges and fences, rows of poplars and canals. Along a line that seemed to have been drawn with a ruler a tractor crawled through a field of stubble, dividing it into one lighter and one darker half. Nowhere, however, was a single human being to be seen. No matter whether one is flying over Newfoundland or the sea of lights that stretches from Boston to Philadelphia after nightfall, over the Arabian deserts which gleam like mother-of-pearl, over the Ruhr or the city of Frankfurt, it is as though there were no people, only the things they have made and in which they are hiding."

Sebald, I think, possesses many of the qualities which I have come to think are essential for anyone writing a travel essay/memoir of this sort. He has the capability to be a critic of what he sees, the interest and determination to pursue further research of anything that seems worth it, the sort of active minds that allows him to keep thinking and associating and being present even after walking a dozen or more miles, and the passion to convey the why of what he is doing. His clearly extensive education, international experience and perspective, and his little circle of equally passionate, interesting acquaintances add additional richness to the book and give its wandering nature clear purpose.

The only faults I can really find with this book is that occasionally Sebald's prose can cross the line from beautiful and reflective into territory that was too schmaltzy and sentimental for me (but that is really very occasionally), and, as would be the case with any set of essays that cover such widely disparate topics, some stories struck my fancy much more strongly than others. I will always be ready to read fifty more pages about melancholic Victorian poets than I will about exploring leftover Cold War paranoias at former bomb testing sites. But I cannot emphasize enough that these were minor problems in what was otherwise one of the most pleasantly competent reflections on the inevitable nature of time and change and human idiosyncrasies in the face of that I can remember reading.

I've read that a number of the men and women considered the great minds of the last few centuries were famous walkers, who were notorious for being unable to work out knotty problems while sitting down. Count Sebald's work as another variation that proves the theme.




(*The other two memoirs were Fermor's Time of Gifts and MacFarlane's The Old Ways. I will grant you that Fermor spends little time in the British Isles itself, but it is where he starts and in part inspires him to travel so I feel entitled to claim it. In any case, I highly recommend both.)