Long and winding river

Andy Beckett on W G Sebald's Austerlitz, a meandering journey through time, place and genre

W G Sebald
415pp, Hamish Hamilton, £16.99

In W G Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, which helped him acquire a large British reputation, one of the more memorable scenes - intentionally or otherwise - involved a fogeyish narrator, staying at an empty seaside hotel in Suffolk, attempting to eat fish and chips. The fish, Sebald begins,"had doubtless lain entombed in the deep-freeze for years... The breadcrumb armour-plating had been partly singed by the grill, and the prongs of my fork bent on it... The tartare sauce was turned grey by the sooty breadcrumbs." When the narrator finally manages to bite into his fillet, he finds "nothing but an empty shell".

To load a bad meal in a small English town with so much morbid imagery takes a certain confidence. But so hypnotic were Sebald's sentences, and so suggestive the connections he kept making between his depressed narrator's minor wanderings and whole galaxies of grim forgotten history, that it was easy to go along with the book's relentless melancholy. At times, it was delicious; the text even came with attractively faded photographs of ruins and wintry beaches.

Austerlitz is just as bleak and self-contained a work, only longer. Its main protagonist is an elderly architectural historian, Jacques Austerlitz. He lives in a barely described, vaguely contemporary east London. He has "devoted almost the whole of his life to the study of books", and to blotting out the horrors of his upbringing. This, we gradually learn, involved the Holocaust, the destruction of his original childhood world in Czechoslovakia, and his deportation to a chilly foster family in Wales. The story of it all comes framed by a second, anonymous narrator, who may or may not be Sebald himself, and who meets the old academic at mysterious intervals.

As before, the precise ratio of fiction to non-fiction here is tantalisingly unclear. Real places and events drift across the smooth surface of Sebald's prose, its immense sentences marshalled by waves of commas, but so do dreams and speculations. Tremendous but conventional travel writing - Brussels rooftops "crammed together like pack ice", the Thames "black as cart-grease" - can turn into talk of ghosts and time travel and back again without the intervention of a full stop. There are no paragraph breaks, and there is no conventional direct speech. The reader, at times, has to suspend a considerable amount of disbelief.

The plot, as much as there is one, progresses as a series of epiphanies: the infant Austerlitz in Prague, watching from a balcony as a tailor eats his nightly supper in a workshop below; the young Austerlitz sighting the Welsh coast after a winter confined inland with his foster parents; the middle-aged Austerlitz replaying a Nazi propaganda film about a Czech ghetto in slow motion, looking for his mother's face. This continuously heightened tone can be exhausting, like reading the best, climactic moments of dozens of novels one after the other. There is no restraint, either, in the frequency with which Sebald introduces his favourite themes and symbols. As in his other books, there is much lingering in derelict places, long trance-like walks are always being taken, and characters are constantly afflicted by headaches and feelings of dread. Given the minutely controlled rhythms and structures of his writing, it seems unlikely that Sebald failed to notice the closeness of parts of this novel to self-parody. From the first page, it is as if he were offering a challenge: follow my obsessions, or give up now.

The characters and atmospheres are really vehicles for a worldview. "In any project we design," as Austerlitz puts it, "the absolute perfection of the concept... in practice... must coincide with its chronic dysfunction." Near the start, between reminiscences, Austerlitz gives a characteristically extended lecture about the 19th-century fortification of Antwerp. Each time a new ring of forts was built around the city, he explains, advances in siege techniques made them obsolete, so the Belgians commissioned further defences, whose very complexity ensured that they would never be finished before they became redundant. The final fort sat squat and useless until the second world war, when the Germans turned it into a concentration camp.

Sebald and his characters are fixated by history, and by that of 19th-century Europe in particular, for the lessons it carries about how apparent rationalism can turn monstrous. In this, as in the book's use of flashbacks, ominous journeys and panoramic descriptions, there are strong echoes of Conrad's Heart of Darkness. And for all the uniquely lulling rhythm of Sebald's sentences and the trademark eerie precision of his language - his Antwerp fort has "limbs and claws" - other influences, too, begin to suggest themselves. The sense here of people being dwarfed and oppressed by systems is familiar from Kafka and Foucault: even the libraries where the narrators loiter are depicted as infinitely oppressive institutions.

Similarly, Sebald's use of history and architectural detail, biography and travelogue, is brilliant, but less original than his admirers like to suggest. Iain Sinclair has been managing the same fusion for decades. Two years ago the film-maker Patrick Keiller published a book called Robinson in Space , with an architectural historian as a protagonist, a possibly autobiographical narrator to set down his theories, and enigmatic photos to record their melancholy travels around England.

None of this is to suggest that Sebald should switch to writing football novels. The territory he is exploring - the significance of place, you could call it - is much too big and interesting not to be shared with others. And Sebald's intentions, unlike those of his counterparts, are as much emotional as intellectual. The erudition always comes with a sense of human frailty attached: Austerlitz loses himself in architectural theories as an escape from his past; he and other characters spend too much time reading, and have trouble with their eyes; the very length and detail of the novel's descriptions and digressions hint at the impossibility of ever fully understanding the world.

And the book is also, after all, the story of a life. It includes passages with the rawness of a rare, good memoir, and the momentum of - rarer still - a convincing historical epic. There is even a wide-screen battle scene, as Austerlitz listens to his boarding-school history teacher recount the Napoleonic War confrontation of the same name: "The Russian and Austrian troops had come down from the mountain sides like a slow avalanche... I see cannonballs suspended for an eternity in the air... victims flinging up their arms as they slide..."

Often, reading Sebald does not feel like reading about the past, as much as seeing the world through the eyes of someone from the past. The sepia language and the ease of reference to Victorian bodies of knowledge can make you wonder, sometimes, whether the author is actually some sort of ghost. Whenever a character encounters anything modern, which is not often, the usually all-seeing Sebald eye does not bother to record much detail. Or it simply turns away, bewildered. A block of flats is merely "towering", while tiny moths (a favoured motif) have "collars and cloaks, like elegant gentlemen on their way to the opera".

Of course, Sebald is really a professor of literature in his late 50s at the University of East Anglia. He enjoys taking his dog for walks, he said recently in an interview. Yet the otherworldliness of his writing, the way each of his books seems to form a completely enclosed universe, makes what he publishes unusually seductive, compared to a lot of current British fiction at least, with its flat transatlantic phrases and desperation for reader empathy. Whether this makes Sebald a genius or not may depend on your appetite for descriptions of crumbling railway stations.