Sometimes, a book appears which isn't written like any other, a book which seems to be without tradition or ancestry, and which makes us wonder why there hasn't been one like it before. The Rings of Saturn is one of these. It is eminently readable too, even though a straightforward description of it doesn't seem too encouraging.

The story at its most basic level is that of a journey, made sometime in the 1990s, on foot through Suffolk. It is told by a German academic (the author) who has lived and taught in England for some years. The academic is a solitary, thoughtful and depressive individual, whose tale of what he sees and the thoughts that these sights inspires is refracted through so many prisms (illness, tiredness, mild hunger, confusion, the death of a friend) that it becomes a misty meditation on the nature of the human endeavour. For the author WG Sebald, that endeavour is summed up in our history, a history that now moves so slowly that it has almost ended.

I hope that this isn't putting you off, because this strange account of a solitary journey, told after something like a nervous breakdown, and scattered with odd, grainy photos, is like a fairytale, cast on the air to children by a marvellous (but slightly odd) teacher. Is it fiction, or is it something else?

The Rings of Saturn is partly a celebration of the power of the mind, whose prime purpose is to remember and record human achievement. Partly too, it is a meditation on the potential within us all for cruelty and waste. It is also an obituary, because Sebald's bleak view seems to be that nothing now of any heroic or purposeful dimension can ever be achieved (and perhaps never could). The collapse of any grand or important purpose has led to the collapse of the human story. This is How the West Was Won run backwards.

Starkly put, each day our world becomes more narrow, our goals less impressive, our ability to respond to the tragedy that is all around us more limited and confined. We are all - Sebald's first book was called The Emigrants - in exile, lost in a world we cannot make sense of or find a purpose for.

Thankfully (if by now you are about to scurry off to the bathroom for an open razor or giant-size pack of sleeping pills) there is a but.

There is simple, shining heroism in Sebald's tales of Joseph Conrad (the Polish sailor who won his Nobel prize for his writing in a foreign language); of Roger Casement, the Irish patriot who fought against human rights abuse in the Congo, and who was eventually executed by the British; and finally in the life of Sebald's fellow exile from Germany, the poet Michael Hamburger, who spent a lifetime railing against the dumbing-down of society.

And the meditation which forms this book - 'a challenging nocturne' someone called it - is stitched together with magical details, details about Sebald's and other lives, which shine like bright glass beads in a secondhand shop, and are the more fascinating because of the grey background against which we now live. Even in this gloomy atmosphere, don't be depressed; aspire.

Sebald died not many years ago in a car accident (on a foul night that I remember). This and his other classic works (The Emigrants, Vertigo, Austerlitz) are the memorial more solid than granite.

(c) Michael Spring 2008

reviewed 10 April 2008 / London

NOTES - The Rings of Saturn, first published in German 1995, in English 1998, written by WG Sebald, available from eg Amazon. Winfried Georg Maximilian Sebald (18 May 1944 - 14 December 2001), known as Max Sebald, killed in a car crash aged 57 in East Anglia, UK. Obituary eg in The Guardian (http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,6109,619971,00.html). There is a blog about WG Sebald eg at http://sebald.wordpress.com. The Rings of Saturn publishing details: English version first published 1998 translated by Michael Hulse, eg published by New Directions; and hardback by Harvill Press, London, 1998, ISBN 1860463983. Original version in German Die Ringe des Saturn: Eine englische Wallfahrt, 1995, publisher Eichborn, 'bound in vegetable-dyed full east-Indian goatskin of deep blue', 999 copies (these details from http://www.bookride.com/2008/02/w-g-sebald-rings-of-saturn-1998.html).