Human Traces

One of the advantages of living in community is the constant flow of information and education through the interests and recommendations of others. Some times there is just too much to cope with as re books to read. A recent loan which I don't have the time or stamina to get through (over 600 pages of small print in paperback) but nevertheless is on a topic that does interest me I deal with through internet research and report.

This way madness lies
Ambitious study of psychiatry in its infancy

Human Traces by
Sebastian Faulks Hutchinson

Sebastian Faulks made his reputation with a series of haunting novels dealing primarily with war and its effects on individual lives, most notably with Birdsong and Charlotte Grey, which were hailed, justly, for their ability to combine the consideration of complex moral and social issues with intricate plotting and page-turning readability.

His new book breaks somewhat different ground and focuses on issues of sanity and cognition. Like his earlier work, it is structurally intricate, yet intensely focused on the lives of individuals. However, the questions he elects to consider in Human Traces are more abstruse than those which dominated his previous novels, making the integration of ideas and narrative a considerably tougher technical challenge.


The novel's two heroes were born in 1860, the year after Darwin published On the Origin of Species. In the opening chapters, both are 16 and both undergo experiences which convince them to become doctors. In each case, their reasons for so doing are profoundly involved with the life of an older and less fortunate sibling.

Jacques Rebiere, in the rural poverty of Brittany, has a brother Olivier who is mad and lives locked in the stable. Thomas Midwinter, comfortably off (though his father's business is struggling), has a sister, Sonia, who, as the story begins, is effectively being sold off as part of a business deal. Their lives come to intertwine.

Jacques, due to his experience as an appalled witness of his brother's struggle with his demons, is determined to understand madness and, if possible, to cure it. To that end, he decides to study medicine, above all, the workings of the human mind, a process of mapping which, in the 1870s, had barely begun. When, around 1880, the two young men meet at Deauville, they are instantly attracted to one another and end up sitting on the beach all night, talking with a sudden and drastic intimacy.

Thomas confides that he is profoundly interested in the question of how and when humans became human. This vague, abstract concern is directed and channelled by Jacques's profoundly emotional need to understand and help Olivier, and both young men end up pledging themselves to a life concerned with psychiatric medicine.

When we next see Thomas, he is starting his first job, as assistant doctor in a lunatic asylum. His superior is a man of imagination, but the scale of the problem they face is overwhelming; they must tend 2,000 individuals sorted into a few rough categories such as idiocy, cretinism, mania and melancholia, so there is little to be achieved in the circumstances beyond containment.
Jacques, meanwhile, is in Paris, witnessing Professor Charcot's performances at the Salpetriere. A superbly confident diagnostician and showman, Charcot was in the habit of hypnotising his patients and requiring them to act out their traumas for the edification - or entertainment - of a fashionable audience.

Gradually, the lives converge. Sonia has been repudiated by her dreary husband; they have divorced and she is free to marry Jacques. The trio set up a clinic, in which the wretched Olivier becomes a cherished patient. But as time goes by, the two doctors, linked by so many ties, begin to diverge ideologically.

Both are still concerned with the place where mind and body meet, but Jacques becomes involved with the idea that both mental and physical problems might be caused by suppressed childhood trauma. Meanwhile, Thomas is looking elsewhere and is increasingly convinced that schizophrenia is genetic.

The problem with the novel is that it is alarmingly dominated by expository argument. As the narrative progresses, characterisation falls away, to be replaced by talking heads discussing the nature of cognition, the relationship between man as thinking animal and the human predisposition to madness, which is also unique in the animal kingdom.

Psychoanalysis, like Charcot's grandstanding, falls away as a false lead. The thrust of the novel encourages one to believe, with Thomas, that schizophrenia is so profoundly connected with the capacity for abstract mentation that the disease is part of the price we pay for having minds at all.

Human Traces is replete with interesting ideas and contains some exceptionally fine topographic writing. However, with respect to the usual pleasures of fiction, the reader sometimes feels a little short-changed.

There is a superb passage in which we are suddenly drawn into Olivier's tortured consciousness and forced to perceive the yelling chorus that gets between him and the outer world. We are made to see that, prescient and outside time, he senses the onrushing of the Great War, and Christ-like, offers himself as a sacrifice.

Introspection is brilliantly handled, but in the main, human interactions tend to be schematic and only sketchily realised, and there are some unsatisfactory passages of dialogue. Overall, despite the novel's many felicities, I was left feeling that Sebastian Faulks's desire to present complex ideas and arguments sometimes stretches the fictional form to, if not beyond, its limits.

Author

Sebastian Faulks was born in 1953, and grew up in Newbury, the son of a judge and a repertory actress. He attended Wellington College and studied at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, although he didn’t enjoy attending either institution. Cambridge in the 70s was still quite male-dominated, and he says that you had to cycle about 5 miles to meet a girl.

He was the first literary editor of “The Independent”, and then went on to become deputy editor of “The Sunday Independent”.

His first novel, “A Trick of the Light”, was published in 1984. 1989 saw the publication of the first of his ‘French trilogy’: “The Girl at the Lion d’Or”. This was followed by his most famous novel, “Birdsong” in 1993. The French trilogy was completed by the “Charlotte Gray” in 1998. “Charlotte Gray” was made into a movie starring Cate Blanchett in 2002. “On Green Dolphin Street” was published in 2001. 2005 has seen the publication of 2 Sebastian Faulks books: “Human Traces” and “The Footprints on Mount Low”. Most of Sebastian Faulks’ novels have a war theme, although this is usually blended with more than a touch of romance.

In 1999, Sebastian Faulks wrote and presented the Channel 4 series “Churchill’s Secret Army”.

One of Sebastian Faulks’ most acclaimed works is the non-fiction “The Fatal Englishman: Three Short Lives”, a biography of artist Christopher Wood, airman Richard Hillary, and spy Jeremy Wolfenden. “Pistache”, a book of essays, was published in 2006.

Sebastian Faulks’ latest novel is “Engleby” (2007). Sebastian Faulks was awarded the CBE in 2002. He and his family live in London.