In the final months of 2020, finding myself stranded by travel restrictions in Berlin, I re-read W.G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn. I had picked it out of my bookshelf and slipped it into my suitcase the day before all my belongings in New York were put in storage. I didn’t know how long I would be gone.
The structures that had undergirded my life for nearly a decade—my job, home, relationship, friendships—had all dissolved from underneath me in a matter of months, sometimes because of choices I had made, but more often for reasons out of my control. Personal crisis collided with a global pandemic. It would not be exaggerating to describe this period, which lasted about 18 months, as the very worst time of my life, a time when I looked at windows and thought “jump,” looked at a pill bottle and thought “swallow.”
My first novel, The Inland Sea, was published in the midst of this period of unrest, and I was also in the heady first months of love with the man in Berlin who is now my husband. I was a reasonably successful debut author, I was in love, and I was profoundly not okay. Two things can be true at once, of course, but I didn’t know how to talk about it then, and I’m still not sure how to talk about it now.
For years, my confidence in my own writing was rooted in my ability to construct a failsafe narrative. But what I was experiencing in 2020 was a complete breakdown of the well-told story. In those months, when things began to get very bad indeed, I reached for Rings of Saturn, a notoriously “plotless” novel, because I felt that plot was not to be trusted.
Rings of Saturn was a “climate change novel” published in 1995, before anybody had started to think about what that would look like.
I had read Rings of Saturn during university, but I had not retained much of a memory of it. What I remembered was that it was about a man, very much like Sebald himself, walking through the southeast of England in the early 1990s. While he walked, he thought. It was very German. But over the years, I noticed that most of my favorite contemporary writers cited Sebald as an influence, and Rings of Saturn in particular.
In those months, I was often asked about my favorite writers because I was publicizing my novel, a novel about living an ordinary life in the shadow of climate change. When I reached for Rings of Saturn, I was looking for a book without plot, but what I did not anticipate was that it would turn out to be the answer to so many of those questions I was being asked in interviews: what should a literary climate change novel look like? How do you hold the disparities between big and small, fast and slow, together in the same story? Worst of all: do you have hope?
Sometimes, a piece of art happens upon you at just the right time. Rings of Saturn is a book that is about everything and nothing, which manages to contain the whole world. And was, I realized in those lonely, locked-down days in Berlin, a book that spoke to the experience of living through the dawning of the climate crisis. Rings of Saturn was a “climate change novel” published in 1995, before anybody had started to think about what that would look like.
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Winfried Georg Sebald—who went by “Max”—was born in the last year of WWII in the remote German Alps. His father had served in the Wehrmacht during the war, and Sebald for the rest of his life was preoccupied with war’s aftermath and the legacy of the Holocaust, topics that are dominant in novels like Austerlitz and The Emigrants. He was a German writer who lived most of his life outside of his homeland and his mother tongue, living in the UK and teaching at the University of East Anglia, before his early death in a car accident in 2001.
“Wherever you turn, you see something that you find disturbing because it points to a dark past, or a dark future.”
Rings of Saturn, his third novel, begins in the summer of 1992, when an unnamed narrator very much like Sebald tells us that he set off walking through the English county of Suffolk, along the North Sea coast. He has been thinking about “the traces of destruction” he sees all around him, becoming increasingly paralyzed and unhappy, and we’re told that a year after the trip our narrator was hospitalized “in a state of almost total immobility.” It is in the aftermath of this hospital visit, looking back several years later, that the book comes into being.
Nothing “happens” in Rings of Saturn, which is exactly what I loved about it in 2020. Indeed, it looks completely unlike a conventional novel: no characters, no climax. In German, his publishers gave it a subtitle, “An English Pilgrimage,” which Sebald felt limited the scope of the book; he wanted it to contain everything. When the book was released in 1995, Sebald wanted it to be published in every category imaginable. His English publisher, Harville, agreed to do away with the subtitle and publish it in three categories: Fiction, History, and Travel. A bookseller could look at the back of the book and choose to shelve it in any of the three.
When he described to a German newspaper how Rings of Saturn came about, Sebald claimed he had never intended to write a book when he set out on his walk in Suffolk, he simply wanted to get away from things for a while. But once he was there, the environment itself began to affect him. He saw signs of destruction in everything around him, in agriculture, in the legacy of energy extraction, and in the history that produced the landscape as well as the people inhabiting it. “Wherever you turn,” he said, “you see something that you find disturbing because it points to a dark past, or a dark future.” It was precisely the book’s ability to tell stories of the history and the future at once which makes Rings of Saturn feel ahead of its time. It models an awareness of living with climate change—the history that led to it and the future calamity we’re in for—in its themes, its structure, and the stories Sebald decided were worth telling.
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In the early 2010s, when I was working as a bookseller and started taking notice, climate change wasn’t the domain of literary fiction, it was the domain of science fiction: writers like Octavia Butler and Kim Stanley Robinson had been addressing it for decades. But when climate change was a topic of literary fiction it tended to be a vision of near and distant futures, as in novels by Margaret Atwood or Cormac McCarthy. Futures when the oceans had risen, civilization had collapsed, wars over scarce remaining resources raged. Nothing that resembled what it was like to be alive right now, before the ocean swallowed the world’s major coastal cities, but where every few months a new extreme weather event broke records and took lives.
As Sebald’s narrator walks and thinks his way through Suffolk, he frequently finds a way to take a story of human suffering and draw it into relationship with ecological calamity.
In 2016 I read Amitav Ghosh’s book, The Great Derangement, which asks why more literary novels aren’t making climate change a subject of their work, given its gravity. Aside from being frightening and overwhelming, climate change poses problems for a writer committed to the realist mode of most contemporary novels—its events can’t be dramatized by the story of one family or individual, the events are very slow until they’re very fast and often extend far back into the geological past and well into an uncertain future, it can’t be localized to one country or even continent, and the major stories are contained not in the drama of human life but plants, animals, and weather systems. They present barriers to plot.
What I liked about Ghosh’s book, what I took to heart and tried to apply to my own writing, was the idea that writers needed to innovate and find different ways of telling stories if they wanted to write about living through the climate crisis. Climate change presents us with moments in which something that seems innocuous turns out to have a life of its own, and, as Ghosh wrote, “turns out to be vitally, even dangerously alive.” You reach for a vine above your head before realizing it’s a snake, a whorl in the wood is in fact a hovering cockroach. These moments are ones of recognition, in which the vibrancy of nonhuman presence breaks dramatically into our lives. The strangeness and horror of suddenly seeing a fire barreling down a ridge in the middle of winter, or of daffodils blooming in January, or of a polar bear walking through the main street of town, all of these are moments when the familiar and the strange collide. And this, I realized upon re-reading Rings of Saturn, was the tension upon which the novel was built.
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Sebald first travels south, through the remains of windmills and wind pumps abandoned since WWI, stopping at a formerly grand manor in decline since the building of the railroad. “It takes just one awful second,” writes Sebald, “and an entire epoch passes.” This is the first of many instances when Sebald will dwell on ruins, decay, and death in Rings of Saturn. More often than not, the ruin is present in the landscape.
This is especially true when our narrator arrives in Dunwich, an abandoned village on the coast which has tumbled into the sea. What remains he describes as “eerie,” “forlorn,” and “melancholy,” and the view of the sea lapping peacefully over what was once a town fills him with a sense of “the immense power of emptiness.” After meditating on Kublai Khan, Sebald climbs upwards into the heathland overlooking Dunwich. There, he is overcome with sadness about Britain’s long-destroyed ancient forests.
The future begins to collapse into the past, so that Sebald imagines himself “amidst the remains of our own civilization after its extinction in some future catastrophe.”
He thinks ahead, to the contemporary burning of the Amazon rainforest, and man’s tendency to encroach upon the earth, “reducing the higher species of vegetation to charcoal, by incessantly burning whatever would burn.” Continuing along the path of associations, he remembers a wildfire he once saw in Greece, the entire hillside up in flames. And this, I thought as I read, was written when I was a toddler? This was thinking which struck me as entirely contemporary, so similar to the way I myself inhabited my daily life.
As Sebald’s narrator walks and thinks his way through Suffolk, he frequently finds a way to take a story of human suffering and draw it into relationship with ecological calamity. For instance, herring. Sebald spends many pages meditating on the fishing industry. He muses on the way that herring die in the vast nets used in industrial fisheries, and whether we can ever understand their suffering. On the following page, the narrator’s thoughts turn to Bergen-Belsen, and the reader confronts a double-page spread of corpses in a forest, an image of a WWII massacre.
These narrative turns aren’t expected or familiar, nothing about reading Rings of Saturn is familiar. Often, I would find that I had completely missed the moment when we had departed a physical location and moved into a story from history, or a recollection from the narrator’s past. Yet sometimes these techniques seemed precisely to offer the moments of recognition Ghosh had spoken about.
Resting one afternoon on a cliff at Covehithe, overlooking the beach, the narrator spies a couple having sex. But the imagery used to describe what’s happening is utterly unfamiliar, the couple resembling “a many-limbed, two-headed monster that had drifted in from far out at sea, the last of a prodigious species.”
Another of these strange moments occurs when Sebald convinces a ferryman to take him to an island off Orford, a site previously used for secret research by the Ministry of Defense and now abandoned. While walking, the narrator spies a hare. He observes it for a long time, beginning to feel the hare’s panic, and so closely does his perspective meld with the hare’s that he “becomes one with it.” Within moments, the future begins to collapse into the past, so that Sebald imagines himself “amidst the remains of our own civilization after its extinction in some future catastrophe.” This collapse of division between human and animal, between present and the past; they felt important to me. How else to hold together the nature of our present moment, of the world as the climate changes, when so much is strange and unknown?
In those final months of 2020, after reading Rings of Saturn, I recalled the notes and unfinished pages I had written over the previous year about water, love, and journeys I had made into the American southwest.
Towards the end of the novel, Sebald’s narrator arrives at a vast estate called Ditchingham. The park was once filled with trees, but only a third remain. Some were struck with disease, but many were the victims of an unprecedented recent hurricane. The hurricane left entire tracts of woodland flattened. Sebald describes his disbelief and devastation at what he saw when the storm passed: no trees, no birds, no insects, “so that it seemed as if we were living on the edge of an infertile plain.” He remembers, he records, his mind drifts away, and then he keeps moving.
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In those final months of 2020, after reading Rings of Saturn, I recalled the notes and unfinished pages I had written over the previous year about water, love, and journeys I had made into the American southwest. It occurred to me that they might have something to do with one another, these notes. Maybe they could even be a book. Some of these notes were about irrigation or damming, some were stories about drought and wildfire, some were stories about a man who lived beneath the Hollywood sign composing the song “Nature Boy,” some were stories about Georgia O’Keeffe developing a phobia of water. I was thinking about loss and grief, they saturated my every moment, and I still wasn’t sure that I had faith in my ability to tell a story. I kept being asked if I had any hope.
I wrote out a document, and grouped ideas and memories and stories and plot points under ten chapter headings—Rings of Saturn had ten different chapters, I reasoned, so I too would divide my book into ten. I began to work. A story in which a woman remembers a trip she had once taken with a man she loved, writing in its aftermath and looking back. Remembering who and where had been meaningful to her, moving in and out of memories, other people’s stories, and time scales, holding the human and the nonhuman in the same frame.
It would be, I thought, another novel “about climate change,” one that was more honest and frightening than anything I had ever written before, but one which, by virtue of studying Sebald’s model in Rings of Saturn, I felt like I finally knew how to tell.
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Madeleine Watts’s Elegy Southwest is available now from Simon & Schuster.
