I don’t usually get on well with books that refuse to have a plot, I need something to hold onto, and Rings of Saturn has almost nothing by that definition, a nameless walker traces a route through coastal East Anglia and the prose just keeps sliding sideways into digression, the herring industry’s collapse, Roger Casement’s reports from the Congo, the silk trade, Chateaubriand, a dead friend, and somehow none of it reads as scattered. It reads like grief circling something it can’t name directly, which I gather is roughly what the book is actually doing underneath the travelogue surface.

The black-and-white photographs scattered through the text, uncaptioned, slightly wrong resolution, are doing more work than I expected going in. They don’t illustrate the prose so much as unsettle your trust in it, is that photo actually of the thing being described, or adjacent to it, or a fabrication entirely, and Sebald never tells you, which is either a trick or the whole point depending on how charitable you’re feeling. The chapter that got me hardest was the silk-farming history, worms boiled alive in their cocoons treated with the same flat, mournful attention as the herring gutted by the boatload, no hierarchy of grief between an industry and an animal and a person, everything gets the same weight of loss.

This isn’t a book I’d hand to someone who wants to be told a story, it’s a book for someone who wants to be quietly destabilized for three hundred pages and come out the other side seeing coastlines and abandoned railway lines differently. Five stars, and it’s the kind of five where I immediately started looking for what else Sebald wrote before I’d even finished the last page.