Faulks is one of the best novelists I have ever read. This is a hard one to score... as talented as he is, Human Traces gets bogged down under the weight of his research, and though it contains some awesome writing it is also too clunky and awkward for long segments, including a 20-30 page chunk of pure medical speak. Too much, it needed some editing and polishing!

Strangely enough it makes me want to read more Faulks. This was a great experiment that almost worked - impressive novel but I will not be reading it again.

I was really looking forward to reading this book: highly recommended, by an author I enjoy and on a fascinating topic. The idea of two young Victorian psychiatrists [or alienists as they were called] meeting and forming a new method of treating insanity interested me greatly, and so I started the book with great anticipation. The female characters in the story were even more interesting, Sonia with her eye for organisation, and those that turned from being patients to being part of the family and staff of the new residential home.

In fact, as the book developed it was these characters and their relationships that became the "hook" providing interest and suspense: how Thomas and Jacques started going in different academic directions, the building of the new centre, the growing family, Jacques' infidelity, etc. The psychiatry started to shift into the background of the book and the whole structure of the novel for me started to unravel. I was especially irritated by the very long inserts that detracted from the plot, for example Thomas' lecture that lasted twenty pages with hardly a break, his African trip that had nothing to do with either psychiatry or the family, and Daniel's letters that seemed a clumsy device to indicate his approaching fate.

I felt Faulks was trying to incorporate too many different ideas in one novel, allowed too many digressions to interrupt the main plot and simply wrote far too much. The novel, in my opinion, could easily have been two hundred pages shorter and lost nothing of the tension between the two chief protagonists which is really the core of the novel.

I feel a sense of achievement after finishing this book!

It's quite the saga tracking the 3 main characters from childhood to old age. The book is very ambitious in what it sets out to do. It makes us think about what it is to be human. This story covers the physiology of what makes us human (not for the squeamish), looks at the psychology of being human and even touches on the spiritual side of it.

This book was brilliant in places. Really charming and engaging. However a lot of it was tedious. There were some parts that seemed to me like separate novellas and not connected to the story at all but did tie into the being human theme.

This is the 1st book I've read by this author and it has made me want to try another.

A challenging read across an emerging landscape of psychoanalysis in the late 19th Century. Many of the stories of long term patients kept in institutions are available to be seen and read in asylum archives and those stories have been in need of a voice. The barely understood new science of “ mad-doctoring “is well expressed in Human Traces but reads too much like a thesis for a doctorate in too many places. Faulks is very accomplished with his characterisations and it is not difficult to empathise with the main players in the book. He is on familiar ground as the story progresses to the FWW. What is lacking, despite a brave attempt, to vocalise the conflict inside Olivier’s mind, is the authentic view from behind the eyes of those suffering. Ultimately, the mysterious relationship between love, passion and tragedy remains undiagnosed.

Powerful, wonderfully evocative, ambitious, dark and imbued with hope and individual determination amid despair and tragedy, the savage chaos of the fallible human mind. What a brilliant piece of fiction and mediation on madness and the nature of man.

We tend to forget that we're blessed with the wonders of modern medicine and scientific understanding (such as it is) of myriad neurological and psychological disorders that once merely confused, and before, alarmed and terrified 'the flock' as something supernaturally preordained and bestowed. As humanity desperately clambered out of squalling, fearful pre-infancy on its knuckles, we realised we knew less and less, but that we know less and less about more and more. This novel is an absolutely fantastic journey through the 19th century and post-Enlightenment; thought-provoking, poignant and well worth the slog.

If you don't tear up at the denouement of Olivier's powerfully crafted-and-illustrated character arc, you're not human. As brilliant as Birdsong, as heartrending as Hachi; this is a masterful book.

Typically well written and with a very strong research base, the book traces developments in psychiatry through the actions of a pair of friends who meet as young men from very different backgrounds and work together for a lifetime. In the mould of the Russian novelists, the action sweeps through the years and we get occasional glimpses into deeper (and sometimes darker) parts of their minds. Although enjoyable, my concern was the way that nothing really ever went wrong. Their chance meeting always brought forth new and successful ventures. For example, a sad moment like a miscarriage was quickly followed by a successful pregnancy, a long disenchantment between the men is solved by a single letter. is this how life works?

If you like Medicine and Psychology, this is the book for you. I personally devour every chapter of this book as I learned how the methods of dealing with Mental Illness have been evolved over the years and what a long journey it has taken.

This was bought on a hunch from books abandoned, surely by a Japanese college student, in a "Book Off" store in Tokyo. I got my ¥200 worth and more. Lots of tedium, yes, but lots to catch one's interest.
1) A certain timeless British style. Did Faulks intentionally mean to call up a flowery manner that would evoke the late 19th century? I think so, since when the need arises, he transitions into a harder, "scientific" mode – or a more directly narrated war story or adventure in Africa. But early in the book, his Victorian affectations left me laughing in astonishment at his cringeworthy descriptions of the key romantic encounters. Hilarious, even worth the price of admission.
2) The scientific examination of late 19th century psychology, deeply researched and considered. But nowhere in these 786 pages do we see the name Freud. He only refers to him indirectly, in one of the protagonists' major lectures, in which he trashes the "Viennese School." He does mention Freud's early associate Fleiss and his crazy theory of a nasal/clitoral connection related to hysteria in women. Faulks mercifully ignores the story of the nasal "operation" Freud participated with him in, in which some gauze was mistakenly left in the woman's nose and caused an infection.
3) Vivid descriptions of nature, of a primitive insane asylum, of the emotions as well. The good writing is good indeed and enough to humble an aspiring novelist.

But oh my, as another has commented, where is the editor. I guess when some authors have a track record they throw their weight around with the publishers. I think we could easily have a 500 page book here, not an 800 page one. If I can find another Faulks effort around that length, I'd spend... let's say, ¥700!!

This very satisfying novel chronicles the life-long relationship of Jacques Rebiére and Thomas Midwinter, two men in the early vanguard of psychiatry and psychology in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Rebiére and Thomas Midwinter met as boys when Thomas vacationed in Breton near where Jacques lived. Both were intellectually curious and scientifically minded. Jacques’s interest in the human mind was triggered by his older brother, Olivier, who as a young adult was committed to an asylum following a psychotic breakdown. Thomas was drawn to literature, particularly Shakespeare, as a means to examine the human condition. Thomas’s sister Sonia will play a large role in the story as explained later.

The boys developed a deep bond from their shared interest in science. They vowed they would someday partner in a practice of medicine focusing on mental illness. Sonia in an arranged marriage with Richard Prendergast experienced an unhappy life with the vain and failed Richard. They divorced under a deal with Sonia’s father in which he essentially pays Richard to set her free from the marriage.

As they grew into adulthood Jacques and Thomas completed their studies in London and Paris. Thomas took a job as a junior doctor in a large asylum where his dream to help the profoundly ill patients was soon dashed by the dearth of anything that medicine could offer the inmates. Thomas realized the only course of any worth was kind sympathy to their suffering. Jacques studies in Paris where he is particularly interested in the neurological causes of mental disorders, a focus then in vogue.

Jacques visited Thomas at the Midwinter’s country home. Jacques and Sonia fall immediately in love and, when he has finished his studies, they marry. The couple and Thomas move to Paris where the men opened a fledgling practice, treating mostly well-to-do neurotic patients.

Their dream of a clinic is realized when they find a schloss in Austria that they open as a clinic where they treat mostly patients with mild disorders. They devote a portion of their practice to the chronically and severely mentally ill and they bring Olivier from the asylum in France to their hospital.

An attractive young Viennese woman experiencing various symptoms arrives at the clinic. Jacques examines Katharina and concludes that her physical symptoms are manifestations of repressed traumatic memories. Jacques had become enamored with the emerging field of psychoanalysis. Despite her denial of past life traumatic events he determines to treat her using psychoanalytic therapies. He shares her case history with Thomas who is shocked by the descriptions of her symptoms and rushes her to the local hospital where she undergoes emergency surgery for large ovarian cysts. He writes a scathing rebuttal to Jacques’s mistaken conclusions, but does not give it to him. Jacques is aware that he has misdiagnosed Katharina and this creates tension between he and Thomas that will ripen over the ensuring years. The differences of views they hold on the value of psychoanalysis clouds their friendship.

Katharina and Thomas fall in love and marry. Despite the misdiagnosis that nearly cost her her life she remains gracious to Jacques and forms a deep bond with Sonia. Sonia gave birth to Daniel after several miscarriages and Katharina to twin girls.

The lease on the schloss is set to expire and they locate an estate high on a mountain. Jacques takes a sabbatical to visit California where he tours a sanitarium and spa located above Pasadena accessed by a cable-cog railway tram, a means of conveyance ideal for their new clinic. While in California he met Roya, a mysterious Russian beauty of noble descent. (Thomas had met Roya years earlier while traveling as a personal physician to a wealthy patron.)

Returning to Austria the partners commence work on their lofty hospital. Thomas futilely treats Olivier whose insanity is intractable. While at the construction site Olivier responding to voices throws himself to his death from a precipice. Olivier’s condition has sparked an idea that Thomas will explore further – that the psychotic mind is a product of the evolution of the human mind closely related to the creativity and imagination inherent in human thinking. Darwin’s theory of evolution, now about thirty-years old has captivated Thomas.

From a chance encounter with an amateur paleontologist Thomas takes a sabbatical to safari in Africa in search of primal human fossils. It is there that Thomas concludes that the evolution of man is the key to understanding modern human intellect. Leaving the main party to return to Europe Thomas has a near death experience when his party becomes lost.

Back in Austria the clinic is a success. While at a society event, Jacques encounters Roya who has settled in the area with a rich husband (a little too much coincidence here). He is deeply attracted to her and they begin an affair, although he remained loyal to Sonia.

Thomas unlike Jacque had not published a professional paper. Drawing on this ruminations about the origins of schizophrenia (as it has become called) as the result of natural selection gone slightly awry he prepares a treatise on his conclusions. He noted that despite being massively dysfunctional the malady continues to persist in humans; it did not die out as non-sustaining traits would usually do. As the condition is distributed evenly across the world its genesis must have occurred before the human diaspora many millennial ago. Thomas gave a lengthy talk on his conception during which he explicitly critiqued the psychoanalytic school gaining adherents at the time. His speech was not well-received, particularly by Jacques who viewed it as a slap at him. Their rift opened further and deeper.

Thomas and Jacques ultimately decide to dissolve their partnership. Jacques’s and Sonia’s son Daniel has grown to manhood and enlists in the war where he is killed in Italy. Jacques grieves deeply and in desperation visits a medium whose cruel phoniness in summoning spirits shames and insults him. Thomas starts a practice in London, but begins to experience the onset of the disease now known as Alzheimer’s dementia. The two men emotionally wish each other good bye.

Faulk’s work is well-constructed and quite riveting. I thought the periodic reappearance of Roya was a bit contrived and unnecessary to the plot. What was most impressive was how Faulks described the emerging trends in psychiatry while avoiding anachronisms of advances that occurred after the period. The shifting bonds of friendship between the men and their families were a major theme of the novel.

I found the particularly interesting the description of the asylum where Thomas worked as a young doctor. I started my professional career in the mid-1970’s as an administrator in such an asylum in upstate New York. This was near the end of the era of large psychiatric institutions. The main building on the sprawling grounds was built in 1840. On the ground floor as you entered you first encountered the so-called “show wards”. These had the ambience of a graceful, sedate old person’s home. But further on, seldom visited by anyone, were the “back wards” where the most chronic affected and deeply disabled were housed. Although the introduction of psychotropic drugs two decades earlier had drastically reduced the population of severely mentally ill persons by this time, the residual patients with the most intractable illness remained. I recall the notion of providing a “therapeutic milieu” in the hospital, which, as in Thomas’s time, involved treating people with kindness and decency. Active treatment was limited to large doses of medication that had little effect other than to tranquilize. I directed a project called “humanization” (what a terrible term!) that involvement providing privacy and a bit less sterile environment for the residents.

That era is over. By the late 1990’s the hospital of 2,800 individuals was closed, along with a neighboring facility of over 3,000. One would like to think that this was the result of miraculous advances in treatment efficacious, but the record here is certainly not stellar.

I don’t know why I pick on it specifically, but I would defy anyone to read chapter six of this lovely book, and not be entranced by Faulks’ remarkable ability as a writer. My goodness, I wish I could write like that.

Not that it doesn’t fit seamlessly in between chapters five and seven, which are just as fluent. But as I read it I found myself thinking, well, “bloody hell, this man can fly”. You have all of his best points on display there – nothing much happens, but the sheer excellence of his writing simply sweeps you along. The description of the three protagonists doing little more than going for a horseback ride is beautifully done, the gentle growth in the relationship between Jacques and Sonia – marvellous stuff.

The only moment which jarred for me in that same chapter was a brief moment when the two protagonists start discussing their differing theories on what makes people mentally ill. It felt a little like trying to set a textbook to music, or whatever. Other chapters are even denser in that respect: psychiatric theory run riot.

It’s a prodigious book, huge in its scope in many ways. The exploration of what makes people mentally ill is – of course –central, and you can forgive SF for devoting so much attention to his theme (Sorry Mr Faulks, is it even appropriate to talk of “forgiving” you for doing no more than what you set out to do?).

But all the same, embedding a careful analysis inside a work of fiction does at least offer the right to challenge whether he does so in a literary kind of way: and I have to say there were odd moments when I wondered whether I was reading a masterful novel, or a reasonably readable medical text book. In terms of achieving the former, I can’t help thinking he would have been better off trimming a good 100 pages out of the final text. I also found myself wondering how much of what he says is medically accepted, and how much mere conjecture. His brief footnote at the end claims that most of it was actual knowledge at the time; but either way it would have made for a more compelling piece of writing if he had edited it down a bit.

Still, by way of paying Mr Faulks perhaps a rare compliment, I can think of at least one other writer who drifted off into academic-style debate at various points in an over-long novel. And that doesn’t seem to have done War and Peace’s long-term reputation much harm. I don’t mean that simply as a smarty-pants comparison either – for me, the scope of Human Traces really does murmur Tolstoyian greatness along the way.

The book is so long it allows space for gentle variances of style too. Not only the contrast between SF’s inviting prose and the more academic discussion of mental illness. For example, the opening few chapters called Thomas Hardy to mind, if only because the epoch in which he sets the novel is pretty much Hardy’s. Or perhaps Balzac, as another important chunk is set in nineteenth century France. It feels a bit odd to compare him to those two masters, since the prose style inevitably conveys “twentieth century”. But for me, it worked.

I’d read that the geographical setting of the plot bounced around the world a lot, and I must admit I was semi-prepared to be critical. Writers sometimes rely on a change of scene as a kind of substitute for retaining your interest, as it were. But I thought it worked quite well in this case, a natural kind of reflection of the universal nature of his theme. It was a bit of a stretch perhaps to send main character Thomas to Africa for three months, probably in order to set up his image of the original African family of homo sapiens (one of them anyway) walking along with their child holding hands, skipping along; but the image works all the same; and I for one would forgive him that too.

A commonly expressed view of this novel is that it sets out, grandly, to define ‘what makes us human’. I don't entirely buy that. It’s true, SF sets out to explore what the building blocks of making us human might have been, whether even the possibility that lesions inside your brain might be the key to “madness”. And funnily enough, his closing image, of Sonia walking back from the beach, her footprints disappearing one by one, reminds me of a bit of ‘litcrit’ I read a lifetime ago, where Richard Hoggart objected to Longfellow’s image as in:

n  “...we can make our lives sublime, and, departing, leave behind us, footprints on the sands of time”. n

As I recall, Hoggart commented stiffly that footprints in the sand tend to disappear quite smartly by themselves, a stray comment that has stayed with me for more than fifty years. But perhaps that’s the point of this wonderful novel. Thomas and Jacques may fail in their attempt to define humanity, and maybe the human traces do fade. But never, quite, completely.

Fascinating but over-long.

(I'd give this 3½ stars if I could)
Faulks loves the pre-WW1- and WW1-era, always researches his topics well, and creates very believable characters.
All of his books could be shortened by about a third, though, and this is certainly no exception.

In Human Traces, two friends decide to devote their life to the study of and possible cure to mental illnesses.
We follow the two during medical training, work in an asylum (which is more or less just storage) and as they eventually set up their own institution for mental illnesses.

Portions of the book is one or the other giving "lectures" on the brain and its workings, evolution, the development of mental illnesses, the development of psychology (as this book us set at the same time as the Vienna School, Freud) etc which, quite frankly, become quite tiring after a while.

Nonetheless, I am glad I read it as it was extremely interesting to learn more on how mental illness was seen and dealt with 100-140 years ago, and how medicine has evolved since then.

Just make sure you read another book alongside this.