Customer Reviews

Human Traces: A Novel

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Although this is not an "easy" read, it is quite fascinating. The integration of the history of psychology with the story line of two fictional pioneers in the field was extremely well done. I have a degree in psychology, yet found myself learning many new things about the bases of current psychological theory, and I completely enjoyed the trouncing of the Oedipal complex and other parameters of the "Viennese" school even though Freud was never mentioned by name. Faulks draws his characters with style and verve - he has a good handle on both conscious and subconscious motivations, so the people of his novel do come to life and earn a place in your heart.

This huge novel spans the careers of two pioneering psychiatrists, one French, one English, who meet as boys and eventually co-found a sanatorium in the mountains of Austria, until driven apart by professional disagreements and the outbreak of the first War. For the first 250 pages of this 600-page book, the story holds the interest with warm characters, fascinating settings, and the stirrings of romance. However, the long lectures and scientific papers that Faulks uses to demonstrate the growing differences between the two (one is a Freudian, the other a Darwinian) come to clog the book around the half-way point, and although the two men continue to develop in interesting ways as people, he loses the sense of linear narrative. But Faulks pulls it all together in the last hundred pages; always a magnificent war novelist (see BIRDSONG, his masterpiece), his WW1 scenes appear almost as a lyrical interlude, with striking cathartic effect, and his final chapters have their own quiet beauty.

What does it mean to be human? Are we at the mercy of our inner, unconscious drives, a product of incomplete evolution - caught halfway between the new brain and the old brain, a work in progress?

Are people who hear voices crazy? Or, do they retain an ancient ability to talk to the gods, throwback to a previous version of us?

Faulk explores these questions in the context of early nineteenth century culture and science. Darwinism, archaeological discoveries in Africa, and war all play into this rich examination of what it means to be human.

Two men, each from disparate childhood circumstances, come together as clinicians in the newly forming field of psychiatry in Europe. Their ongoing discussion provides the raison d'etre of the plot.

Two women - one, a constant presence, all along the way showing us what may be the most human characteristic of all.

Sebastian Faulk gives us no sketch but rather a masterwork with shadings, details, complex colors, and a grand canvas for it all.

Susan Williams

Faulks has convinced me through this seamlessly and powerfully written novel that he may indeed be the greatest living novelist writing today and still at the top of his form. It is, in one sense, in the great tradition of the Nineteenth Century novel - Indeed, it is set in the late 19th early 20th centuries - without any postmodern pyrotechnics to dazzle the reader. It is simple a masterfully and well-nigh perfectly crafted novel. But this would merely make it a well-wrought period piece. Emphatically, it is not! The story follows the history of two psychiatrists, Jacques and Thomas - one French, one English - who become friends and set out to do nothing less than cure all madness and create a "Unified Theory of The Mind." This particular book - despite claims about Faulks made to the contrary - is only for intellectual heavyweights for a number of reasons. Foremost, the problems they attempt to tackle are still as relevant today as they were a century ago, and the book does not talk down to the reader; all the medical terminology and deep theoretical speculations are completely unbowdlerised and comprise a great portion of the book. And to what end? The troubling proposition the books tenders is spelled out early on by Thomas' mentor, Dr Faverill:

"My instinct, though I am pitifully far from being able to prove it true, is that what makes us mad is almost the same thing which makes us human,"

Just a sampling of some of the discourse herein between Thomas and the explorer Hannes concerning The Bible when they are in Africa in search of evidence of human origins will give the reader some idea of what lies before him or her:

"I read of exile, abandonment and the terrible grief of people who have lost something real - not of a people being put to a childish test, but of those who have lost their guide and parent, friend and only governing instructor and are left to wander in the silent darkness in eternity. Imagine. And that is why all religion is about absence. Because once, the gods were there. And that is why all poetry and music strike us with this awful longing for what once was ours - because it begins in regions of the brain where once the gods made themselves heard."

The book proffers many such passages raising scientific, medical and philosophical questions over which to ponder the fragility of our minds, our selves and how close we all may be to madness with many detailed explanations regarding Darwinian natural selection, chromosomes and mutations to back these speculations up. As I averred, it's not for the intellectually faint of heart.

Towards the end of the novel, Jacques' son Daniel - fighting with the British in Italy in WWI - receives a book of Shelley's poems from Thomas with Shelley's "Lines Written Among The Euganean Hills" underlined because Daniel is, quite literally, fighting among these hills. The final lines of the poem make a much more moving and beautiful summation than I could pen of what this book is about: Man's eternal quest to cure the insane, heal the mind and find peace in this world:

"We may live so happy there,
That the Spirits of the Air,
Envying us, may even entice
To our healing Paradise
The polluting multitude;
But their rage would be subdued
By that clime divine and calm,
And the winds whose wings rain balm
On the uplifted soul, and leaves
Under which the bright sea heaves;
While each breathless interval
In their whisperings musical
The inspired soul supplies
With its own deep melodies,
And the love which heals all strife
Circling, like the breath of life,
All things in that sweet abode
With its own mild brotherhood:
They, not it, would change; and soon
Every sprite beneath the moon
Would repent its envy vain,
And the earth grow young again."

Shelley's lines are interred with Daniel shortly after Armistice Day.

I loved this book and hoped it would never end- it could easily have continued past 570 pages for me! - but then, a lot of the material on the brain, the history of psychiatry and neurology was not new to me, and therefore not a struggle or tedious for me to read. In fact, I enjoyed recapping so much that was familiar to me and also learning something new (new to me). I developed an interest in these fields early in life, although I did not pursue this interest professionally, and I found that Faulks did a great job of covering so many aspects of mental illness - illustrating in fictional form what it might have meant to be mentally ill or working with the mentally ill then, and still today in some parts of the world. Some of the lectures, the case study of Katharina von A, for example, were a bit longish, but in a certain way, these elements, for me, made the book even more compelling because of their educational value, being quite authentic for the period, and presenting the various competing psychiatric points of view in a straightforward almost didactic style - yet all the time tempered by the personal interest we take in the lives of the members of the little Midwinter-Rebiere family.

Surrounding the 'educational' dimension of the book is all the beauty we've come to expect of contemporary 're-creations' of 19th century literature. (There must be a better way to say that!) The book is like a living, moving painting in its vivid descriptions of nature, place, and character. In fact, I found the characters believable, sympathetic and, also in terms of their inner lives, rich. I loved the way the author took us through time with the main characters Sonia, Thomas and Jacques. Found them thoroughly believable and was interested at every turn in their unfolding lives.

I would love to see this as a film, if they could recreate the texture, color and moodiness of the novel (as was done, for example, with Charlotte Grey) but I don't wonder if the psychiatric dimension might be too disturbing for a popular audience. Maybe not, modern films are quite disturbing, after all. Anyway, films always manage to truncate, abridge and change novels, so perhaps it's best to keep it as a fabulous book that takes a nice long while to read.

Honorable Mention: I also enjoyed the side-trips to California, Africa and - having never read Faulks before - the scenes from world war 1 were just stunning in their vividness, beauty, and horror. I felt the sketching of the character of the young soldier was revelatory of a passion that finds a fulfillment in the situation of war - not in the killing - but in other aspects that I think we see in the best literature and art on the subject of war. Apparently, Faulks is well-known for war-writing.

But in this book, that is only one chapter. The rest is devoted to something else, the quest for healing, for wholeness, for 'being human' - a quest which has been a part of my own life (I did choose a medical profession, in the end), and I enjoy books that explore that quest intelligently.

This book is superb on so many levels, I really can't praise it enough.

Vendor was prompt and professional.
Item was clean and good value.
Stultifying, slow moving, could not finish this tome.
Not the Faulks that I know and love.

Our main protagonists, Rebière and Midwinter, meet in 1880, when they are both twenty-years old and destined for greatness in the burgeoning filed of alienism, or "mad-doctoring." Slow-moving and deliberate, the struggle of understanding madness is helped by lectures from Charcot, a famous neurologist. Rebière has a brother, Olivier, who seems to have all the symptoms of schizophrenia, although this disease, when the two doctors start their journey, hasn't been diagnosed yet.

Midwinter and Rebière are forever tied together, not just because of their joint venture in mad-doctoring, the establishment of a stunning sanitarium in Carinthia, but also because Sonia, Midwinter's sister marries Rebière. Fate twists and distorts, and Katherina A., an initial patient of Rebière, who is a young woman suffering from mysterious debilitating pains in the abdomen and arms and hand joints, is initially thought to be suffering from hysteria.

Midwinter reads his partner's case study and determines that her illness is not hysterical in origin, but physical, and rushes her off to Vienna for ovarian surgery that cures her. Subsequently, Katherina A. becomes Midwinter's wife, Kitty. Sonia births a son, Daniel, while Kitty delivers twin girls, Martha and Charlotte. Life plods on in the deliberate slowness of the era, all the while readying us for Sonia's fleeting thought at the end of the novel, "...human beings could live out their whole long life without ever knowing what sort of creatures they really were. Perhaps it did not matter; perhaps what was important was to find serenity in not knowing." Interesting and dynamic subject matter with all the requisite drama of a book this size, over 600 pages.

Armchair Interviews says: This is an excellent historical read based on the birth of psychiatry.

I do not understand why the Brits dissed this book so heartily. It was one of the best I've read this year. Granted, one must have some interest in mental processes and illness, which I do; however, I should think we are all interested in what it means to become human. The characters were just fine, the writing was clear and focused...please give it a try.

It is saddening to rate a work by the author of the sublime 'Birdsong' as less than excellent, but 'Human Traces' disappoints. The novel spans the period of greatest development in the understanding of the human brain in the late 19th and early 20th century, using the two central characters to summarize these developments. As a history of pyschology, it is educational and digestible. But as a novel, it is tedious: the storyline meanders, with no detail too trivial to be omitted in the name of period color; the excursion to America by one of the protagonists could be entirely cut from the book, there is a Mills & Boon quality to some of the scenes, and the characters remain just out of focus.

The youthful ambition of Thomas and Jacques, the two 'mad-doctors', to comprehend human consciousness and hence cure mental illness is, of course, unrealized by the end of the story after the Great War. They live and love, father children, build their careers, and get a chance to expound their theories (which are interesting), but the ambitions of the novel are ultimately as unfulfilled as those of the main characters.

Having read many of Faulks' novels, I was looking forward to reading Human Traces. It started well, but ultimately was a disappointment.

Overall, there is something about the characters that is not quite 'real'. Whilst I was interested to know what happened, my interest was never quite full. There seemed to me to be random characters added for no reason other than to fill a few pages. The course of the story moved like a badly edited film, with long and short 'hops' in time that seemed to come at inopportune times in the narrative.

Overall, for anyone interested in Faulks' work, I'd recommend Bird Song, Charlotte Gray, or the excellent Engleby before Human Traces.