I liked it a lot. There were lots of interesting things in there. There are definitely some sections where the author's research gets a bit out of control, so you get long lectures and articles of nineteenth century psychiatry and psychology, but considering that that is one of the advertised subjects of the novel, you can't be too critical, and actually, I liked those parts. Faulks clearly feels strongly about the history, and makes his views pretty clear all the way through.

The way that the two sides of (Faulks' view of) psychiatry are presented is also interesting. Rebiere obviously becomes a sort of personification of the 'Viennese school' (wouldn't want to mention Freud by name, obviously - I assume he was the doctor who wrote about the thing with his mother on the train that Midwinter mentioned in his lecture part way through the novel), and is therefore driven to pseudoscience, beyond justifiable reason, by his personal obsession with curing his brother and recovering memories of his mother. Midwinter is throughout the 'good doctor', and represents Faulks' side of the psychiatric argument. It therefore amused me that he was motivated to study psychiatry largely by literature - the novelist seeing his own profession as the route to saving the world (well, almost).

I must admit that, when the three main characters were planning to finish medical school, gather some experience, and set up their sanatorium, it all seemed a bit easy, and their interactions were all a little bit Enid Blyton, although that was not true of their separate experiences over the course of the same part of the novel. I guess the problem here was that you know before starting to read the novel that these plans at least would all be fulfilled. But in the end, I really enjoyed the book. It was poignant, but not nihilistic (at least not in my opinion). Maybe that 'Enid Blyton' phase was a necessary part of the poignancy: Life is difficult. You have to want to do things that you may not succeed in, or there is no progress, and no improvement in knowledge and medicine, or therefore in peoples lives.

This book was surprisingly a faster read than I expected considering the subject matter and the size. Faulks is now one of my favourite writers and I intend to go back and read all of his novels that I've missed. It is staggering to think of the amount of research needed to write this book. The history of the study of madness, as Faulks so brilliant depicts, is a long convoluted one with some doctors lost in the mire of false diagnosises and others completely "off base" and of course it takes its toll on the two main characters in Human Traces.
I found the ending particularly poignant but was a little disappointed with the "voices" of the two very different main characters. Despite one being French, the other English and both having quite different world views - when you're inside their head it seemed to be the one person. I'm aware that this wouldn't bother a lot of readers but it's something I'm particularly fascinated with and this is my only criticism. For those who are interested in the subject matter - a very worthwhile read.

Shakespeare drew a new map of the human mind as clearly as Newton mapped the heavens. Why is one considered science and the other fit only to be mocked with jokes about pretty girls and Drury Lane?

It turns out that a fiction writer is much better at explaining science to me than a renowned psychiatrist. I read earlier this year an autobiography of Irving Yalom, who bored me to death with irrelevant details about his private life and failed to provide a clear image of the basis of his beliefs. Well, except for one detail that has relevance to the present novel: Mr Yalom has become convinced early in his celebrated career that writers and philosophers have as much to say about the way the human mind works as scientists and psychotherapists.
I knew already that Sebastian Faulks is a great storyteller. What I didn’t really expect was that he would help me map the early developments in the study of the human brain with such clarity, with such passion and with such compassion.

“You see, I have this idea that we must somehow try to understand the meeting point between thought and flesh. That is what the next great aim and discovery of medical science will be. Are you with me?”

Starting in the late Victorian Era, with two children driven by curiosity to understand the world surrounding them, the progress of science is overlaid by the personal lives of these two boys, following their struggles to understand and treat madness until the time of their retirement more than five decades later.
The novel should have been heavy with the research material included in the text, but I burned through the pages with unexpected swiftness, captivated both by the slow, tentative and fraught with errors progress in the science and by the personal, emotional journey through life of the two doctors with their families and friends.
I can understand how many readers might find the novel overlong and even difficult when the usual plot is replaced by very long dissertations about the workings of the brain. My own fascination with the subject and my admiration for the way mr. Faulks likes to tell a story prompt me to add this book among my personal favourites.

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He is just like me, but completely different at the same time. He has had all the same thoughts yet they have come from a different life, a different world. It’s like two men bumping into each other in the jungle when one started in Iceland and one in China – and finding they are reading the same book.

Before becoming a book about science, the novel is a story about friendship, and about love and about a life well lived.
Thomas Midwinter is born in England, in a relatively wealthy family who has a countryside manor and a moderately successful business. An adventurous child with a passion for poetry, Thomas is advised by an older sister named Sonia, to seek a career in medicine.

Jacques Rebiere grows up in a poor region of Bretagne, with an abusive and indifferent father and without a mother, who dies giving birth to him. Thomas has an older brother named Olivier who manifests signs of schizophrenia as a teenager and lives chained to a wall in a barn. With some help from the local priest and driven by a desire to help his brother, Jacques begins to study biology and medicine.

Years later, when both Thomas and Jacques are students of medicine, they meet in Deauville on a holiday with Sonia. They recognize each other as kindred souls, and make a vow by the ocean, under the stars, to dedicate their lives to understanding how the brain works.

Over the years, their journey will take them from an insane asylum in England, to the conference halls of the Salpetriere in Paris and finally to a private clinic in Austria, with detours into California, Germany, Central Africa and many other places of study. Families and children, professional successes and defeats, world wars and economic strife will only be the background against which their life mission unfolds.

Thomas had a moment of despair, as he always had when seeing madness en masse, a sense of trying to empty the sea with a bucket.

The period of study chosen by the author is not accidental. It starts with early efforts to help those afflicted by mental illness by gathering them together from families and into asylums where they can be provided with help and studied scientifically. Among the many names and studies mentioned here is one Samuel Tuke, a pioneer of care that replaced punishment with kindness and understanding for the less fortunate among us.

It was curious, he had to admit, that the first medicine was not a herbal preparation or a surgical procedure, but simple kindness.

The next step is to classify and describe the nature of the illness, and in this area a prominent place is given to Jean Martin Charcot, whose presentations in Paris are attended by both Thomas and Jacques. His theories about the physical nature of mental illness [the flesh] will be later challenged and put in perspective by later students.

The move to Austria and the focus on what will become known as psychotherapy is a logical step for the two young doctors as they continue to search for the elusive link between the mind and the flesh.

Nihil humanum sibi puto alienum esse

There is little difference between a doctor and an artist. Both try to understand what it means to be human. Both are prone to passions and insecurities, to valuable insights and to following wrong paths. Thomas and Jacques work together, but follow different paths and slightly different methods in their studies: Thomas the poet seems more interested in the way genetics play a role in causing the brain cells to misfire, while Jacques becomes focused on the study of dreams and childhood trauma. Thomas, who loves Shakespeare and is not adverse to Bible interpretations, can identify clues in old myths and clerical texts, even in fossil footprints from millions of years ago. Jacques gets carried away by the promises of a universal key to unlock the human mind provided by the new guru of the salons in Vienna.

Jacques and he had not been able to cure madness, so they had fabricated something that they could cure.

The two main directions of study are made clear with the help of two actual cases:
- For Thomas the schizophrenia of Olivier, still unabated after three decades of illness
- For Jacques the treatment of a young woman who presents symptoms of childhood trauma manifesting as physical illness.

I am grossly simplifying the journey here, bypassing many intermediary stages and numerous secondary characters that are important either in the medical studies and in the personal lives of the doctors. But it helps me put my thoughts about the novel in order, even if it does a disservice to the five years of work the author put into this novel.

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First, the Thomas approach:

“One day, this instability may regulate itself through successful transmutation. Until then, I do not see men like Olivier as being degenerate or retarded; I see them rather as at the forefront, in the vanguard of what it means to be human.”
“But they suffer,” said Franz.
“My god, they suffer. I think they suffer for all of us. It is almost as though they bear the burden of our sins. It is scarcely too much to say that they pay the price for the rest of us to be human.”

The first step is to separate the amorphous mass of madness into categories. Oliver’s illness was named hebephrenia in the early days, before being lumped together with general schizophrenia. Thomas had few tools available for his studies in those early days, relying mostly on post-mortem microscope studies of brain tissue and on extensive reading into the contemporary papers. His conclusions are speculative at best and with few practical applications, but I found the way he connects religion and literature to the problem to be captivating.

“If we are right about the hereditary nature of schizophrenia, then perhaps we can breed it out of the population, as we breed Jersey cows, tea roses or greyhounds. On the other hand, if it is as closely linked as we believe to the combination of genes that give us our human capacities, it can never be eradicated. You would have to annihilate the whole of humanity.”

Of even greater interest is the way Thomas can express the limitations of the scientific method in a way that proves this to be its greatest asset:

“So Mr. Darwin was right about one thing and wrong about another.”
“Yes. That is the nature of science. [...]”
“And does that apply to you as well, my love? That you will not get everything right?”
“Yes. The two-step-forward-one-step-back law of scientific discovery will take care of that. And the limits of the human mind.”

... and the way he speaks respectfully of religion without renouncing his basic humanism:

“Will you be able to do all this without recourse to God? Is He not more likely to provide the answers than hereditary processes we cannot understand and instruments that have not been invented?”
“That has traditionally been His role – the guardian of mysteries. But He is a costive and niggardly keeper. He does not give up any secrets. Humans unriddle them all for themselves. When we have answered the last question, we will have no more need to dignify our ignorance with the name of ‘God’.”

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Jacques tries to embrace psychoanalysis as an early adopter and ends up underlining the limitations of the method right from its inception:

Small truths, homely facts, when they are applied to the world as representative of all the world, cease to be facts and become superstitions. Thus has this little thought become elevated, made sacrosanct and set to work as a dogma in a school of ‘medicine’...

I find it extremely relevant that the name Freud is not mentioned a single time in the novel, while that of his contemporary Wilhelm Fliess is given a direct role in the plot. My own reservations about Freud are in this way amply confirmed by mr. Faulks. I will leave the actual details of the harm that can be done by a too strict adherence to a fanciful theory that tries to extrapolate from a few individual cases to the whole range of human mental processes to those readers who are patient enough to follow the arguments in the novel.

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What else can I add here? Sebastian Faulks has a keen sense for the historical background that animates his fictional characters and anchors them in well known events like the First World War, the early days of the California boom, a mountaintop sanatory in Carinthia or a memorable journey to the Great Rift Valley.
He also has a balanced approach to the role the women played in the lives of these doctors driven by science. Sofia Midwinter in particular has as strong, as important a presence in the economy of the novel as Thomas or Jacques. From a constricted, much abused Victorian maiden who is refused an education and forced to marry a man not of her own choosing, she manages to carve for herself a full and interesting life beside the two most important men in her life.
I have kept the last quote as a way to underline that even a life that ends in defeat is worth living, if you learn to look upon its hard earned moments of grace.

I must pull in sail and lower my sights from the horizon. I am quite content to do so because I have been so fortunate in my life.

I wanted to love this book - there are so many boxes it ticks for me. But there are many, many problems with this novel. I was invested in the two main characters, Thomas and Jacques - and their quest to understand the human brain, what makes us human. Set in the late 1800s/early 1900s, at a time when there was so much to discover, it unfolds slowly and quickly at the same time. But there are so many places where it just loses its way (the construction of the damn railway and the African expedition are just two). There is also Faulk’s beautiful writing and vivid prose to carry you through. An uneven experience.

NYT review: https://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/15/bo...

"Human Traces" by Sebastian Faulks is a literary journey that navigates the intricacies of the human mind across generations. The narrative spans continents and decades, exploring the evolving landscape of psychiatry and the profound impact of mental health on individuals. Faulks skillfully intertwines the lives of his characters, creating a tapestry that weaves through time and medical advancements. The depth of psychological insight is evident as the novel grapples with the complexities of consciousness, identity, and the quest for self-understanding.

The characters, from doctors grappling with their own demons to patients seeking solace, are richly developed, adding layers of emotion and authenticity to the narrative. Faulks' prose is eloquent, engaging the reader in philosophical contemplation while maintaining a gripping plot. The novel not only examines the historical context of psychiatry but also prompts reflection on the broader human condition. "Human Traces" is a masterfully crafted exploration of the mind's labyrinth, inviting readers to ponder the profound mysteries of existence.

Cardboard 19th-century psychiatric folk plod through 600 pages of stodgy research.

I'm on page 638 of 787 of Human Traces: Really enjoying this book, a fictional story based around fact and the early stages of attempts to understand mental illness and psychosis; the beginnings of psychiatry and psychology. It offers a fascinating, insightful, as well as beautifully-articulated understanding of the origins of such 'illnesses', drawing together various schools of thought and much of the scientific theory we have come to understand as providing the most sensible (and sensical) explanation for our amazing human abilities; natural selection, evolution, heredity, and these linked to the physical structures and assymetry of function of the brain as we know it and the (then) unknown 'physical units of inheritance' - the chromosomes, genes and allelles themselves. This is intertwined with the life story of two men, their personal and professional struggles and their drive to uncover the mystery of mental illness, suffused with drama, love and the reality of life and death.

I struggled with this book a little. A nice story but a bit too in depth making me have to work at what i was reading.

This story was quite the experience, following a trio of people through almost their entire lives: The English Thomas, his sister Sonia, and their French friend Jacques. Thomas and Jacques start out with grand ideas, setting out on a quest to identify the causes behind mental illnesses in a time before genetics and the hereditary process has been established, with the goal of finding cures for people like Jacques’ own brother, Olivier. Sonia changes the course of her own life when she falls for Jacques, and the three set up a sanatorium of their own in Europe, first in a country home, before moving up a mountain. They are each passionate and intelligent, Thomas and Jacques both confident men with a strong understanding of what they want and what they shall one day achieve. They differ on where the answers lie, but still set out together, believing they complement each other.

However, though these characters are fictional, their world is otherwise the same as ours, with all the major discoveries made by people who are not these two. The book stays true to that, with Thomas and Jacques each making their own developments and trying to release something meaningful into the world, but that real-world constraint prevents them from achieving that. The book moves into a reflection on the value of an ‘unfulfilled’ life and what truly matters, looking at family, children, and a life spent helping others. Starting in the late nineteenth century and moving into the later years of these characters, it inevitably leads into the First World War, with the tragedy and disruption that comes to a group of disparate people from across Europe living together in Austria at this point in history.

Sebastian Faulks certainly did a lot of research into the developing theories in psychiatry of the period, and that shines through. Though the characters themselves are fictional, all the research, discoveries and assumptions are not. That level of authenticity - and perhaps a need to do something with such copious research - means some chapters are prone to info-dumps where, for those without a specific interest in the topic, are points where the mind can’t help but glaze over a little. There’s a strong sense of humanity to the novel, but these lengthy moments of exposition detract from that element. Still, when they work (and they often do), they offer a fascinating look into the development of ideas we now take for granted, when people in these fields were, if not quite scrabbling in the darkness, at least looking at things before they could do so with the level of detail available today.

Alongside that, there’s a tale of this group of people, following them from childhood to old age, with all their human wants, flaws, successes and failures. They make mistakes, and some aren’t always likeable, but that’s inevitable in a story that spends their lifetimes propped on their shoulders, following them through each misstep. The story ends not with Jacques or Thomas but with Sonia, and it’s her thoughts on humanity that close the novel:

“It seemed to Sonia at that moment, drenched and tired as she was, that, perhaps for quite simple reasons connected to the limits of their ability to reason, 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.”

This is a monumental novel, wide in its range of both the personal stories of the characters and of the period which saw the early beginnings of Psychiatry as a scientific discipline. It’s the late 19th Century and doctors and researchers are awakening to the drive to seek a cure for the afflicted rather than lock them up in asylums.

Through its well-drawn and developed characters, with Thomas and Jacques leading the diverse cast, the novel takes us on a riveting journey through this period. We follow the trials and tribulations of the nascent disciplines of Neurology and Psychiatry, of Thomas and Jacques’ careers as burgeoning psychiatrists, and of the personal lives of the characters populating this wide-ranging novel, bringing us up to the end of WWI. The fictional story is strewn with references to, and descriptions of, the non-fictional institutions and leaders of the field and of their research.

The story itself is engrossing and moving. There is a certain point in the novel in which we access the tormented mind of Olivier, Jacques’ insane (later to be defined as schizophrenic) brother. Being in his mind, imprisoned in his torment, is one of the emotional heights of the novel.

The novel’s range is wide in its attempt to capture, through the story of Thomas and Jacques’ lives, the complexity of the uncharted essence of the human mind and consciousness as it has evolved from well before homo sapiens became the dominant species. It does so admirably.

I found the non-fictional parts, embedded in the novel as background to the story of Thomas and Jacques, to be an added value giving credence and clarity to the narrative as a whole.

Beautifully characterised with brilliant period detail (particularly detail of early psychiatry!). In many ways, not that much happens in this novel. And everything happens. Loved it.

I tried really hard with this book. I have thoroughly enjoyed every other Sebastian Faulks book I have read, so was looking forward to getting into this one, but after the best part of a week I’ve had to admit defeat. It’s just so terribly boring. Reading other reviews, I see that it took five years to write. My best guess is it could take that long to read if the number of times I nodded off is anything to go by. If I had wanted to read a text book history of psychiatry, I would have bought one. If I wanted to be a doctor of said subject, I would have studied it. I have surmised from the previous books I have read that Mr Faulks is an intelligent, well educated man, I really don’t need him to prove it to me with page after turgid page of nineteenth century gobbledegook purporting to be psychoanalysis. I completely lost interest.
Will I return to this book in the future? I don’t know. Somehow I doubt it. Perhaps if some night I find myself suffering from chronic insomnia I’ll pick it up and bore myself to sleep, but other than that I can see no reason why I would want to try to read it again.
I always promised myself that I wouldn’t write a bad review. That I would always find something positive to say about any book I read. This time I find I can’t. Mr. Faulks is an excellent author, but with Human Traces, I feel he is being self-indulgent and I cannot take him seriously, neither can I find anything worthwhile to say about it. I feel I have wasted enough of my time on it, I certainly cannot spare five years!