Human Traces: A Novel | Sebastian Faulks | A winning novel of human insight

Human Traces: A Novel | Sebastian Faulks | Excellent read

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Human Traces: A Novel

	Human Traces: A Novel Sebastian Faulks Random House, 2006 - 576 pages average customer review:based on 7 reviews view larger image
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What is it to be human? This question, as in Birdsong, is at the heart of Human Traces.

The story begins in Brittany where a young, poor boy somehow passes his medical exams and goes to Paris, where he attends the lectures of Charcot, the Parisian neurologist who set the world on its head in the 1870s. With a friend, he sets up a clinic in the mysterious mountain district of Carinthia in south-east Austria.

If The Girl at the Lion d?Or was a simple three-movement symphony, Birdsong an opera, Charlotte Gray a complex four-movement symphony and On Green Dolphin Street a concerto, then Human Traces is a Wagnerian grand opera.

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A winning novel of human insight

Mr. Faulks writes with great intelligence and insight about two young men
who pursue their common goal of helping the mentally ill. Two different personalities attempt to work together as one,yet never quite manage. No two people can ever be quite alike no matter how close their personal interests are. Is there anyone so stable and without quirk they are completely qualified to help the mentally ill?
Yes and no. The main characters shine through by sheer sincerety and effort of will.
I found the " psychological treatises" do create
cohesion in a book with curiously stable and yet unstable main characters.
An excellent novel until the very end...

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Excellent read

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.

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Humanity more compelling than psychiatry

This book had a lot going on at different levels - family stories, history of psychiatry, World War I - and more. It definitely would have benefited by tighter editing (e.g., removing some of the storylines that went nowhere, shortening the medical lectures and making them less pedantic). And some of the scientific suppositions are so prescient that they are not believable. But I was touched by the human side of the story. CAUTION, SPOILERS AHEAD. Having lost a child (though not in the manner of this book), the parents' sense of loss here brought me to tears. And the irony of a man who spent his life studying the human mind losing his, and being aware of his trajectory, was both heartbreaking and ironic.

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Long on learning, long on compassion - but mainly just long

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.

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reviews: page 1, 2

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