The Rings of Saturn

In August 1992, a German-born writer and academic living in East Anglia sets off on a walking tour of Suffolk, England, hoping to dispel the emptiness that follows a long period of work. Though the walk initially brings freedom, he is repeatedly seized by horror at the traces of destruction visible even in the remote countryside. Exactly one year later, he is admitted to a Norwich hospital in a state of near-total immobility. Each chapter follows a stretch of his coastal walk but spirals into layered digressions on history, biography, natural science, and decay, all connected by the narrator's brooding consciousness.

Before recounting the walk, the narrator reflects on the deaths of two colleagues: Michael Parkinson, a modest bachelor scholar found dead of unknown causes, and Janine Dakyns, a lecturer devoted to Flaubert who succumbs to illness weeks later, seemingly unable to bear the loss. Through Janine, he contacts a surgeon regarding the skull of Thomas Browne, a 17th-century Norwich physician and writer. Browne's skull was disturbed from his grave in 1840, displayed in a hospital museum, and not reinterred until 1921. The narrator traces Browne's biography and speculates that he attended the 1632 public dissection in Amsterdam depicted in Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson, noting that the painting's dissected hand is anatomically transposed, a deliberate error signifying the violence done to the executed thief Aris Kindt. Browne's baroque prose, his fascination with natural patterns, and his meditation on mortality in Urn Burial, a treatise prompted by ancient funeral urns found in Norfolk, become a recurring thread.

The walk begins on a grey August day with a train from Norwich toward Lowestoft. The narrator disembarks at Somerleyton Hall, a once-magnificent estate rebuilt in the 1840s by Sir Morton Peto as a princely palace with glasshouses and seamless transitions between interior and garden. Now the hall is faded, its rooms filled with bygone paraphernalia. In a hothouse, the estate gardener William Hazel recalls the wartime bombing raids launched from East Anglia's airfields, describing how he memorized the names of German cities as they were destroyed and how, after the war, Germans themselves seemed to have erased all memory of the bombings.

The narrator walks to Lowestoft and finds it in severe decline: factories closed, unemployment rampant, the seafront reduced to amusement arcades. He reflects on the town's Victorian heyday and recalls his late friend Frederick Farrar, a retired judge born there in 1906 who shared memories of Edwardian childhood and the annual charity ball on the white pier.

Walking south along the coast, the narrator meditates on the decline of the sea: polluted rivers, toxic algae, deformed fish. An extended passage traces the natural history of the herring, from its spawning in vast shoals to the mysterious phosphorescence the dead fish emit. At Benacre Broad, a dying lake, he recalls the obituary of Major George Wyndham Le Strange, who served in the regiment that liberated Bergen Belsen and then became a recluse on his Suffolk estate. Past the Covehithe cliffs, the narrator reflects on the biblical story of the Gadarene demoniac, in which Christ casts a possessed man's demons into a herd of swine. Peering over the cliff edge, he glimpses what appears to be a pale creature on the beach below, actually a couple lying together, filling him with consternation.

In Southwold, the narrator sits on a clifftop green imagining the 1672 Battle of Sole Bay and reflecting on the futility of naval warfare. He recalls a previous trip to The Hague and Amsterdam, where dreamlike atmospheres and surreal street violence left him unsettled. He visits the Sailors' Reading Room and discovers a photographic history of World War I. That afternoon, he reads about atrocities committed by the Ustasha, the Croatian fascist movement, at Jasenovac, a World War II death camp where some 700,000 people were killed. The passage ends with an oblique reference to a young Viennese lawyer who drafted resettlement memoranda for the Wehrmacht, Nazi Germany's armed forces, and later became Secretary General of the United Nations.

A BBC documentary about Roger Casement, the British consul executed for treason in 1916, prompts the narrator to reconstruct the intertwined lives of Casement and the writer Joseph Conrad. He traces Conrad's biography: born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in Ukraine, orphaned after his parents' involvement in the Polish resistance against Russian rule. The young Korzeniowski becomes a sailor, arrives in Lowestoft in 1878, and begins absorbing English. In 1890, he travels to the Congo, where he witnesses the horrors of King Leopold's colonial enterprise, an experience that shapes Heart of Darkness. The narrator follows Casement's parallel trajectory: his 1903 memorandum exposing the Congo's slave economy, his documentation of similar abuses in South America, and his growing identification with the Irish cause. Casement joins the Irish independence movement and is arrested; excerpts from his private diary documenting homosexual relations are circulated to prevent clemency. He is hanged, and his remains are not exhumed from a prison lime pit until 1965.

Near the River Blyth, a local legend about a narrow-gauge railway whose carriages were built for the Emperor of China launches a meditation on the Taiping Rebellion, a messianic movement that killed more than 20 million before its collapse in 1864, and on the British Opium Wars, which culminated in the destruction of the imperial gardens of Yuan Ming Yuan. The Dowager Empress Tz'u-hsi, who rose from concubine to regent, rules through two child emperors, presides over catastrophic famine, and reserves her strongest affection for the silkworms she keeps. She outlives the second emperor by less than a day.

The narrator walks to Dunwich, once a major medieval port, now reduced to a few houses after centuries of coastal erosion, and recounts the biography of Algernon Charles Swinburne, the Victorian poet who memorialized the place. Climbing Dunwich Heath, the narrator becomes lost in a disorienting landscape before reaching Middleton to visit the writer and translator Michael Hamburger, who emigrated from Berlin to England in 1933 at age nine. They discuss the difficulty of writing, and the narrator feels an uncanny sensation of having lived in Michael's house before.

A conversation about the intertwined histories of sugar and art leads the narrator to the ruins of Boulge Park, where the writer and translator Edward FitzGerald grew up. He traces FitzGerald's isolated childhood, his retreat into a hermit's cottage, and his sole completed work: a celebrated translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. FitzGerald's deepest attachment was to a young man named William Browne, whose death in 1859 drove FitzGerald further into seclusion. A visit to the decaying Irish estate of the Ashbury family extends the theme of genteel ruin: the Anglo-Irish landed class destroyed by the Troubles and slow impoverishment.

Traversing the Sandlings, the narrator crosses to the abandoned Orfordness weapons research site, where concrete bunkers resemble prehistoric tumuli and the emptiness suggests a civilization after its extinction. He visits Thomas Abrams, a Suffolk farmer who has spent 20 years building a scale model of the Temple of Jerusalem, and reconstructs the story of the Vicomte de Chateaubriand's 1795 sojourn with the Ives family in Bungay, where 15-year-old Charlotte Ives fell in love with the young French émigré, only for him to reveal he was already married. Walking to Ditchingham, the narrator describes the catastrophe of the October 1987 hurricane, which destroyed over 14 million trees overnight, leaving the landscape devastated and silent.

The final chapter returns to Thomas Browne's Musæum Clausum, an imaginary catalogue of curiosities, and follows the thread of a bamboo cane containing smuggled silkworm eggs into a history of sericulture, or silk cultivation: from its legendary Chinese origins through Byzantium and Italy to England, where Huguenot weavers settled in Norwich. The narrator traces failed attempts to establish silk cultivation in Germany, from Frederick the Great's plantations to the Nazi regime's revival of the program after 1936, complete with propaganda films and educational materials recommending silkworms as tools for teaching productivity and racial ideology. The book concludes on Maundy Thursday, April 13, 1995, with the death that day of the father of Clara, the narrator's companion, and a final image drawn from Browne: In 17th-century Holland, when someone died, all mirrors and paintings were draped with black ribbons "so that the soul, as it left the body, would not be distracted on its final journey, either by a reflection of itself or by a last glimpse of the land now being lost for ever" (294).