A witness to our hidden ghosts

What is the meaning of Sebald's "I"? It is a question that has become more obscure with each of his books and which finally, with Austerlitz, seems unanswerable. I have always thought that it was the voice of conscience, of reprisal, of lost things. Here it is used more in the sense of witness: the "I of the author merges with the "I of Austerlitz, the man who is the book's subject, so that they are for long periods indistinguishable. Is Austerlitz Sebald's alter ego? Or is he, to put it coarsely, real?

These interrogations are and always have been provoked by Sebald himself. His fictions work in the manner of a web, an intricate mesh of connections; but these connections are not, cannot be, innocent. To look at Sebald's narratives together is to see the process by which the artist erases himself in pursuit of that innocence, by which he struggles to translate, to justify, to expiate and finally to become that which he observes. In Austerlitz, the author is a character, a narrative device. He is the person to whom Jacques Austerlitz tells his story.

This story, which is the story of the Kindertransport, is recognisably the destination for a large strand of Sebald's artistic and emotional preoccupations. Childhood, displacement, loss, nostalgia and, above all, fear - the fear of history, of event, of human cruelty, of the pain of recollection - find their deepest and most brutal expression here, and are constellated against the material things that survive our experiences and may or may not testify to them. Austerlitz recounts his story intermittently, over a period of years: his meetings with the narrator are random and frequently occur by chance in train stations. And so the meaning of this book extends to the very fibres of its construction: truth hangs by a thread; people are moved on or disappear, leaving their stories unconcluded.

Austerlitz says he can remember almost nothing of what happened to him before the age of five, when he was put on a train alone and sent to England. He was adopted by an unaffectionate Welsh Calvinist couple and told nothing of his past. A vacuum was hence created in him, and as the years passed he became actively frightened of finding out what this vacuum represented, of discovering its detail. Although certain things triggered recognition in him, he suppressed it, preferring to live in ignorance.

One day, as an adult, he is standing in a bookshop in London when he hears two women speaking on the radio about their experiences of Kindertransport. One mentions seeing the sails of Dutch windmills from the train. At this moment he can deny recognition no longer: he knows that he too saw those windmills, that their story is also his.

Austerlitz sets out to find out where he came from, who his parents were and what befell them. Sebald negotiates this desperate, tragic quest with a combination of documentary and dream. Austerlitz finds his way to Prague, and then to the very apartment building in which he had lived with his parents. There he finds Vera, the woman who was his parents' friend and neighbour and who used to look after him as a child. There is a strong atmosphere of fairy tale here - Austerlitz's reality and the emotional world of his childhood have become merged. Everything in Vera's apartment has been left as it was: his little bed, the books they read together. Slowly, she tells him about what happened to his parents, about wickedness.

He goes to the nearby ghost town where his mother was sent and from where she never returned; then, finally, he retraces his train journey to the Hook of Holland. At one of the stations he sees an encrusted cast-iron column: poignantly, he forms "the idea, ridiculous in itself, that this cast-iron column, which with its scaly surface seemed almost to approach the nature of a living being, might remember me and was a witness to what I could no longer recollect for myself."

Sebald's encounters with human history are never straightforward: his route, and the unique prose style which is its consequence, is explicitly emotional, individuated, a long counter-argument to the machismo of the historical process. Austerlitz, sitting on a platform at Liverpool Street station, is led by the turbaned man who is this narrative's benevolent ghost into an old waiting room hidden within the rebuilt station edifice: it is the very waiting room, he realises, in which he sat as a child waiting to be collected by the strangers with whom his life would now be spent.

This image crystallises the nature of Sebald's literary enterprise: a fusion of the mystical and the solid; a search for hidden things; a process of salvage. His art is a form of justice - there can be, I think, no higher aim.