Orbital perturbations

 

     When W. G. Sebald encounters a dotted line of fishermen gazing out to the North Sea from the shore south of Lowestoft, he writes "They just want to be in a place where they have the world behind them, and before them nothing but emptiness". That seems to sum up this book. The Rings of Saturn is ostensibly a cerebral journey inspired by a walk around East Anglia, but it is very hard to classify  - or even describe accurately - being part travelogue, part memoir, part meditation, and Sebald called it "prose fiction" which then leads the reader to question which of its scenes are factual records and which imaginative meanderings. But whatever it is, it's the work of an extraordinary mind.

     Its discursive style leads from items of local social and historical interest to Swinburne in Putney, Conrad, a fascinatingly eccentric Irish household and the funeral cortege of the Emperor of China in 1861. One such digression I must quote for its wonderful technical terms: on silk production in Norwich prior to the Industrial Revolution these materials are listed - "silk brocades and watered tabinets, satins and satinettes, camblets and cheveretts, prunelles, callimancoes and florentines, diamantines and grenadines, blondines, bombazines, belle-isles and martiniques..."

     Sebald himself is elusive, hiding behind his knowledge, occasionally appearing obliquely on the physical journey and through the scholarship, only to vanish as quickly again, and to that extent the book leaves the reader with many questions. Who is this man and what is he seeking on his way? "The east stands for lost causes", he says, so is it significant that it's eastwards he has gone? ".... we all move, one after the other, along the same roads mapped out for us by our origins and our hopes...ghosts of repetition...haunt me with ever greater frequency".

     This is an original and mysterious book, intense, curious, finding patterns in life and history, taking a spiralling course through time and place. It requires some concentration but is undoubtedly worth the effort.

Comments

[Peter the Flautist]

Let me add to Cornflower's enthusiasm for this book, it is very well worth reading and its unusual style adds to its power, when in lesser hands it might just seem an irritating trick.

To see a nice example of a small object perturbing one of the rings of Saturn look at this Cassini mission photograph: http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/image-details.cfm?imageID=2569

Dark Puss

[Avice]

Thank you for your lovely evocation of a compelling book and a compelling writer.

[adele geras]

I loved this book too. I've never forgotten that Funeral Cortege and the bit you pick out with all the materials is marvellous. I recall that bit as well. He's an amazing writer and his invisibility is part of the magic.

[Lindsay]

Dark Puss's picture was very smart, but didn't mean a lot to me - I had rather hoped for the ring to be tied in knots!

A verbally related concern is with the misguided plan to cull badgers to control cattle TB: in fact, culling allows other badgers to move in, spreading any infection more widely, an effect known as population perturbation.

And what have the rings of Saturn got to do with the book, anyway, Cornflower or Dark Puss? The link to silk production or Norfolk is not obvious to this dimwit!

[dovegreyreader]

I now see Sebald as the perfect writer to just lose myself in. The mood he creates is quite amazing and the way he links all those disparate elements, often with just a single thought, mmm, more Sebald now Cornflower?

[Peter the flautist]

Why the Rings of Saturn asks Lindsay? Well it is a good question, and I'll hazard a guess (which is surely wrong). The book is concerned with minutiae and detail. The rings of Saturn in the bulk are quite easy to see even with fairly low-powered telescopes (say the sort you might use for bird-watching) and indeed Galileo came close to discovering their true nature with his simple instruments. However they are extraordinarily complex and unbelievably thin (a few km, perhaps less). It took many years of careful human observation to discover the Cassini and Enke divisions, and with spacecraft such as Voyager and much more recently the amazing Cassini the true microscopic (microscopic on a planetary scale anyway) details are being discovered.

I'm sorry I couldn't find a picture with knotted rings, I think that implies a highly unstable and turbulent system. However you might just imagine you can see twisted yarn in this false colour UV picture of the amazing detail in the "A" ring (also it looks like the grooves in a vinyl record to me too): http://lasp.colorado.edu/cassini/images/orange_density_PIA06994%20large.jpg

Astro Cat

[Peter the Flautist]

Illusory braiding of the narrow "F" rings here for Lindsay (best I could do!) http://pds.jpl.nasa.gov/planets/captions/saturn/fring.htm

Astro Cat