Adrift on the Fens

The whereabouts of Thomas Browne's skull acts as a suitably oblique starting point for W.G. Sebald's extraordinary book The Rings of Saturn (Harvill, £12 in UK) This uneasy philosophical travelogue, personal odyssey, history and elegiac study of life and, more particularly, mortality, is both beautiful and pensively bizarre. Sebald is an obsessive thinker, profound and eclectic; whether or not he is a novelist is open to debate. The Rings of Saturn has as much or as little to do with the novel form as does, for instance, Bruce Chatwin's Songlines.

Sebald makes no attempt to hide behind a narrative voice. The doubts, anxieties and fears are his own. This is his story of a journey undertaken on foot through coastal East Anglia. The intensity of his travels is never in doubt. If there were to be a soundtrack, it would be the music of Britten. It is a metaphysical quest intended to achieve peace of mind for an individual who clearly lives in his thoughts. If there is a ruling tension in his work it is that of the real versus the invented. Sebald's response to fact is to take the story further through interpretation and invention. He loves detail. He also lives on the margin of things and so makes himself an observer rather than central character.

The artistic or rather intellectual sensibility shaping this odyssey is not only unmistakably European - Sebald is a German academic who has lived in England since 1970 - it is also that of an 18th-century man of letters preoccupied with ideas. The past concerns him far more than the present. For him, the present is merely the final chapter in which traces of the stories of the past remain. Death and the collapse of epochs are his theme. His narrative consists of a series of intriguing paper chases. Each clue leads to another, all apparently as random as memory itself and as deliberate as art.

A year to the day after he began his journey, Sebald is taken to hospital "in a state of almost total immobility". His hospitalisation causes him to write this book. While there, he experiences the contrasting sensation of the physical freedom he had enjoyed on his journey and the confinement of a world reduced to "the colourless patch of sky framed in the window" of his hospital room. Of course, he compares himself with Kafka's Gregor Samsa and the first person he refers to in his narrative is a friend who died suddenly and mysteriously. The pattern is set for the book.

Characters mostly historical are brought on stage through a fact or observation, and from this Sebald constructs a brief study of a life. Referring to Dunwich as "a place of pilgrimage for melancholy poets in the Victorian age" serves as the cue for a short piece on Swinburne, a known victim of his nerves. Small of stature, Swinburne owed his extraordinary appearance to his large head, "which sloped away weakly from his neck". It was to make him an object of amazement at Eton. "On the day that he started school - it was the summer of 1849, and Swinburne had just turned twelve - his was the largest hat in all Eton."

This is the way in which Sebald's mind works; a chance fact develops into a story. Elsewhere he summons up the shadowy presence of Edward Fitzgerald, translator of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Horrified by "his heavily-carpeted family home stuffed with gilded furniture, works of art, and trophies of travel", Fitzgerald lived a reclusive existence in a tworoomed cottage on the family estate. Often taking to sea in a boat called Scandal, Fitzgerald lived a quietly obsessive, solitary life marked by deep sorrow. Sebald's study of him is fascinating. Of Fitzgerald's death, which occurred unexpectedly while he was visiting a friend's house, he writes: "Crabbe [the friend] heard him moving about his room, but when he went somewhat later to summon him to breakfast he found him stretched out on his bed and no longer among the living."

Sebald's sympathetic description of the early life of novelist Joseph Conrad helps explain that writer's subsequent restlessness and thirst adventure. Curiosity born of half listening to a TV documentary about Roger Casement drives him to explore the life and death of a man whose homosexuality, Sebald argues, "sensitized him to the continuing oppression, exploitation, enslavement and destruction, across the borders of social class and race, of those who were furthest from the centres of power".

As he wanders along noting destruction and loss and, above all, the havoc caused by the passage of time, there are wonderful observations - fishermen camped along a beach are likened to "the last stragglers of some nomadic people". All the while his memory is busy, and this does lead to excess. A visit to the site of the Battle of Waterloo, where he uses the camera obscura, results in his making one of his habitual large pronouncements. History, he declares, is invariably falsely seen. "We, the survivors, see everything from above, see everything at once . . ."

Sebald forces the thesis that we are all part of all histories. Ruined great houses, even trees, cause him to ponder death and dying - not without humour. Great houses certainly interest him as testaments of the dead and they way they lived. He recalls an AngloIrish family he once met who seemed to be camping out in their collapsing ancestral heap. According to Sebald, they "lived under their roof like refugees who have come through dreadful ordeals and do not now dare settle in the place where they have ended up".

Silk worms and herrings; Chinese tyrants and doomed love; Thomas Browne's Urn Burial and Rembrandt's The Anatomy Les- son; Dutch elm disease and the death of the English countryside - Sebald has embarked on an intellectual journey by explaining a state of mind and of loss. Two years after the publication of his widely praised and somewhat over-rated debut, The Emigrants, he has achieved a unique work of imagination, a diverse, far more elusive variation of Claudio Magris's Danube (1989). This is a strange, mesmeric and highly imaginative meditation. Elegant and eccentric, this ambivalent collage of history and mood pieces indulges, intrigues, seduces. Se bald sets out to make his reader think - and does.