The story of two men set in the 1900's who approach the mysterious diseases of the mind from two very different approaches. The women they marry, the journeys each man takes which eventually brings them together in a sometimes tenuous relationship all develop into a psychological soup.

This book was referenced in another that I read and does show how 19th century doctors thought and the steps and treatments they took when dealing with the mind and it's complexities. The story is fiction, but much of the discussion of treatments and the thinking of the day are true.

I would call it a mildly depressing book because even the two principal doctors, Jacques and Thomas, have mental dilemmas which the reader explores with them. There is a sadness and fatalistic tone to the story and so much "this is what the main characters were thinking" that I got bored and just skimmed the last third of the book which, by the way, is 609 pages long.

At the beginning of the Bible, everyone - Noah, Abraham, Moses - seemed to hear God's voice externally; then it was only heard by a minority, who became priests; then the gift became rarer, so the infant Samuel could hear but the old priest Eli could not; and then by the time of the New Testament, Christ alone - and perhaps Paul - could hear voices.

Is there some universal human memory available to all? Or are all our little minds just aspects of one great consciousness?

Thomas believed that the illness had entered into mankind the moment he evolved into Homo Sapiens; it might be the very price he paid for the acquisition of higher consciousness.

Alfred Russel Wallace could not agree with Darwin's theory of blind variation - because mankind was in his brain and consciousness far more perfect, than from the point of view of survival, he had any need to be.

It was the acquisition of the ability to introspect that made a leap in our species, and that faculty depended on our development of language. The capacity of self-awareness was not in itself the result of a mutation. It was a cultural development that was passed on and learned afresh in each generation.

Broca's moment of 'eureka' was when he localised language in the left hemisphere of the brain.

Apes perform any task with either hand; humans are the only hand-lopsided species, and this reflects the unique skewing of their brains, that enabled them so greatly to increase their capacity, to generate language and, through language, self-awareness.

Perhaps one day human beings will carry only vestigial higher consciousness, a simpler version having been selected in the fight for survival. Bats in their caves, who once had sight, survive as well or better without their eyes.

I really enjoyed this. It follows two psychiatrists though their whole careers, charting all their loves and losses too, and it spans the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. One of the big themes is madness; but it goes beyond this, delving into what it is to be human. There are a lot of meditations on this from the two main characters, including a few of their lectures. This is unusual for a novel, and some would find this side cumbersome, but I found it fascinating!

I picked up this 2005 novel as it was recommended by my friend and esteemed work colleague Julie. In short: I loved it.

I see from both Goodreads and newspaper reviews that this novel is not universally liked but it was right up my street. It follows the lives of two doctors, from their childhoods through their careers as specialists in psychiatry to their old age. They set up a clinic together despite developing contrasting theories as to the causes of and treatments for mental illness, and their intellectual differences both bind them together and drive them apart.

This novel was perfect for me because Faulks skilfully wove together fictional biography with medicine, psychiatry, travel, the thrill of early scientific discovery, moral complexity, interpersonal relationships, love and philosophy - all things I really enjoy reading about. The sometime lengthy exposition of early psychiatric theory in the book is often singled out as a point for criticism, but I found it fascinating. I was completely absorbed into the world Faulks created.

The edition I read ran to 786 pages but felt far shorter. This is a book which I will remember for a long time.

Wow. Where do I even begin?

I suppose I'll just start by saying right off the bat, how much I absolutely love this book. I read somewhere on here that it took Faulks five years to write - and I'm not surprised. This sprawling tale that starts off with two young men, Jacques and Thomas, "brothers from another mother" meeting on a beach in France, and beginning what is to become a lifetime friendship, which blends into them becoming family, work-colleagues, and business-partners too over the years. Like all brothers they have their fallings-out, periods of animosity and competitiveness, but ultimately their bond endures; helped by the fact that Sonia is the sister of Thomas and later becomes the wife of Jacques.

This tale is epic: beginning in the late Victorian period, moving through fin-de-siècle Paris, early 20th century Austria, the intense upheaval of the First World War and ending in post-war England. Along the way Thomas & Jacques (whose disciplines in medicine move in different directions, as they work to unravel the workings of the human mind - one from a more biological approach, the other in an early venture into the psychiatric and psychoanalytic realm of treatment) travel to see the earliest evidence of human existence among the rift valley in Africa, and the new world of invention and innovation in California, respectively.

With time spent in the miserable asylums in England and the burgeoning research being conducted in the Pitié-Salpêtrière in Paris, each young man works diligently, feverishly even, to qualify as doctors in their field of expertise, and begin practicing in order to save every penny they can to open up a sanatorium where they hope to try to help understand, cure, or at least make life easier for the troubled mentally ill individuals for whom life has been utterly miserable.

But among all this ambition also weaves a more solid tale of their relationships, the families they create and the wonderful characters who infuse their lives with curiosity, beneficence, mischief, intrigue and joy. Marriages take place, children are born, lifelong friendships are formed and losses are felt deeply. Chance occurrences in fleeting meetings with those who go on to play a huge part in these characters' lives, mirror those chance mutations that via natural selection, went on to make us the human beings we know - and still seek to truly understand - today.

Faulks has created this beautiful tapestry of life, in a way in which I believe he intends to mirror the complexity of human life, the fragility of the psyche, and the fortuitous yet almost unlikely luck in which homo sapiens first came to be. Thomas and his search for the real tangible proof of mental illness that can be pinpointed on a slide of brain tissue, compliments Jacques in his own search for the more nebulous, harder to pin down, understanding of the human psyche. The marriage of these two approaches causes friction between the two ambitious young men, just as in reality the differing emerging schools of thought surrounding the brain, mind and psyche, found themselves at odds with one another in the medical community.

Faulks has done a fantastic job of researching the history of the study of mental illness and having done a little reading on the subject myself, I recognised a few of the names featured for their famed forays into the human mind. He really made people like Charcot come to life vividly on the page, and in writing the theses of both Jacques and Thomas, created utterly believable documents that he had obviously spent a huge amount of time perfecting.

There is so much I want to say about this book, but won't, because I don't want to spoil it for anyone. I felt as though the people I was reading about were all incredibly real; I felt joy for their successes and even shed a tear over some of their own sadnesses. (And everyone should wish to have a Pierre Valade turn up unexpectedly, every so often in their lives!)

To those who thought this book ought to have been shorter, I must vehemently disagree. (These are probably the same people who think that the entire haystack part of Lev's experience in 'Anna Karenina' should have been cut out, along with most of the society scenes, with as rapid a rush to the denouement as possible! But each to their own I suppose.) I personally would have welcomed another 300 pages spent among the lives of the characters in this book...although poor Mr Faulks would probably have gone mad as he ended up taking ten years to write them! That he managed to fit in so much into just over 600 pages without any of it feeling rushed or abrupt, is a miracle in itself.

The poignant ending seemed to perfectly sum up what I believe was the underlying thesis of this book. For all the intense scientific study of the brain, regardless as to whether one's approach is rooted in the biological or the psychological, it is the lives we lead with the people we love, which truly allows us to experience what it means to be human. Life is precious, sometimes fragile and yet can cause us to become stronger in the face of adversity. Some things happen by chance and some things amount to nothing; the dead ends of human connection as common yet inexplicable as some of the genetic dead ends that never go on to emerge in our physical or mental make-up. (I believe the mysterious other Mr Midwinter, found secreted in the garret of the asylum, never to be spoken of again, was perhaps an allegorical allusion to these lost genetic markers that disappear down the ages.)

Some parts of this book turned out just as I expected, but many did not. And that is just the way it should be - in my mind at least. This was the first book by Sebastian Faulks that I have read, but I daresay it will not be the last. In fact I see that he has written a follow up to this book "Snow Country" which returns to the sanatorium built by Thomas and Jacques, only now under new management and facing different problems in 1936. (I think I may be a little late to the party insofar as discovering this author is concerned, but if anyone else is curious about trying out some Faulks for the first time, this book would be an excellent starting point.) I am awarding this book a much deserved five star rating, and I hope that my review may convince at least one person to give it a go. (Also: I have the hardback copy and the jacket design is just so perfect: detailing a seascape that is at once both beautiful and bleak, which encapsulates the themes of this novel brilliantly.)

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

The year after Darwin publishes origin of species two boys are born , one in England one in France, who will make their name together in the new field of psychiatric medicine . This is a rich and fascinating novel taking in the early days of psychology and psychiatry , their relation to the emergent theory if evolution , and the link between madness and fundamental humanity .

There are a few cliches in the storytelling - a doctor patient love affair, the loss of a son in the Great War ( which I know obviously happened to very many but it just seemed a bit obvious here) but still a great book. If you don’t like a novel that’s going to exposit scientific theory to you avoid it though, but this was a strength for me. I don’t know whether it’s thesis that madness is a price of consciousness is tenable but it’s interesting.

Reviews and comments are divided on this book. If you come to it looking for jeopardy, brilliantly rounded characters or a gripping yard you might want to read the first hundred and the last hundred pages. Faulks is doing something much more interesting. He is showing us the development of psychological theory in the early 20th century. He bifurcates, using the two main characters of Jacques and Thomas the development into the modern neuroscience and the psychoanalytic methods favoured by Freud amongst others. Faulks widely attacks psychoanalyse but rather than tell he wishes to show us why. He then makes a much more profound point about the human condition. We focus either too widely, often outside our life times, and in doing so lose the sense of who we are or we are too myopic and fail to see our own shape in the world.

Omg. No words. I am in tears.

Will update and revise this review the next time I carve out some free time and I've collected my thoughts.

But in a nutshell: Fantastic. I'm shook!

Absolutely fantastic read

Anyone interested in the development of psychiatry and psychology as well as enjoying a strong story line should read this book - fascinating, I wished it would keep going...

Sebastian Faulks is a prolific writer, and Human Traces unmistakably comes from his stable of works. The brutality and horror of trench warfare (a Faulks staple), and a raw and raunchy, illicit, love affair are duly incorporated in the book. Its pure historical fiction, set between 1866 and 1920, as Faulks delves into the vigorous, and emerging debates and research taking place among neurologists and psychiatrists trying to determine causes of, and cures for, mental health ailments. Its a subject matter, and a time, in which European pioneers (especially in Germany) were prolific in their theories and theses.
Boy does Sebastian Faulks get wrapped up in the subject, and its very hard to dispute the charges levelled against this (609 page) novel, that it is too lengthy, and that fiction is too frequently abandoned for exposition. Unless you a specialist in the field its hard to be sure whether Faulks captures the essence of the arguments as debate raged. In the end book acknowledgements Faulks cites numerous reference books and admits that he had to break from his aversion to listing a bibliography in a work of fiction. Given the extent to which he immersed himself in the subject its not surprising that he feels this is an unfinished work of his.
What struck me about the renowned doctors and medics cited was threefold:

•tFaulks is at pains not to mention Freud by name, and refers only to the “Viennese School”

•tA significant number of the pioneers referenced in this time period, are so enduring that their names are attached to the science which has continued today, 150 years later. They include:
otHenry Maudsley (1835-1913), who founded his eponymous urban hospital for the mentally poor in 1907
otAlois Alzheimer (1864-1915) who identified the first published case of "presenile dementia"
otGilles de la Tourette (1857-1904) whose main contributions in medicine were in the fields of hypnotism and hysteria

•tThe true giant of the era was Emil Kraepelin (1856 –1926). The father of psychiatric genetics, and the first investigator of manic depression; I'm surprised he is not more of a household name outside his profession.

Themes

We are going to show what makes us human (236)
What it means to love someone is to be everything. To bend all your powers to their happiness.
The load of being human (602)

Synopsis

Brother and sister Thomas and Sonia Midwinter become inextricably entwined with the Rebiere family, and especially Jacques and brother Olivier. The reader is taken on a bildungsroman account across forty years, from early adulthood, to (by today’s standards) early old age (turning sixty). Fraulein Katharina Von A (Kitty) is the other main character in the extended family providing a human element that offsets the science and medicine of the book. Providing the raunch is Roya Mikhailova
The book has a truly global reach in in various settings, from the Schloss Seeblick in Austria, to the Saltpetriere asylum in Paris, Ngorongoro in Tanzania, and via Pasadena in California, back to England. The Midwinter family home in Lincolnshire, Torrington, is a particularly impressive anchor at a time of great change and fluidity.

Questions

•tI wonder if Faulks took any inspiration from F.Scott Fitzgerald’s < b> Tender is the Night . “I suspect that each of us may have a great moment in our life” (531). Kitty’s feeling for Thomas is reminiscent of Doctor Dick Diver, in a novel in which psychiatry and the Alps is also central to the story.

•tWho is the archivist in the attic room “whose name is also Midwinter” ??

Author background & Reviews

Faulks has become a literary household name on the back of his fourth novel, Birdsong in 1993.
Theatre director Trevor Nunn, seemingly without any sense of hyperbole called Human Traces "A masterpiece, one of the great novels of this or any other century.”

Recommend

This isn’t a book to casually recommend, but for those who already have a declared interest in psychiatry, and the early years of care for the mentally ill in the nineteenth century it will be illuminating. A more accessible story is looking to escape from the sometimes verbose novel that got published. The next instalment is due imminently, after fifteen years, and in Snow Country , Martha Rebiere (twenty three at the end of Human Traces), picks up the threads.....

Story of two men from around 1870 to 1920 - Jacques Rebiere (an unschooled but bright Breton from a poor, rural background, haunted by the death of his mother at his birth and determined to find a cure for his mad brother Oliver - not least so he can tell him more of their mother - with the sponsorship of a local priest he studies medicine) and Thomas Midwinter (youngest son of a comfortable but struggling English family and interested in literature, whose sister Sonia – initially married to an eventually failed businessman to protect the family interests – convinces him to go into medicine so he can understand more about his interest which is what it means to be human).

In a rather improbable scenario the two meet in France and in an all night conversation (in which Thomas learns to speak French) inspire each other to work together in their future lives to attempt to unlock the secrets of the human mind, including setting up a clinic together once they have both trained.

Thomas after Cambridge works in a lunatic asylum where he realises that modern medicine is now in the stage of warehousing lunatics together (after stages of wandering madmen, believes of possession, asylums as entertainments) but has abandoned much hope of a cure. He is friendly with two patients – Daisy and a blind girl Mary. Jacques learns his medicine in Paris and studies under Charcot a historical person who believed hysteria to be connected to the sub-conscious and proved this by hypnotising patients.

Sonia is divorced by her husband after his business fails (in exchange for a final loan from her father) and marries Jacques, they all move to Paris and then just as Jacques receives his doctorate are funded by the mysterious millionaire patron of a painter whose family Thomas is asked to accompany on a European trip, to set up an clinic in the alpine foothills and then over time in the mountains (by aid of a cable car) where they can practice their ideas and theories. Daisy, Mary and Oliver all join them (Oliver suffering from voices in his head – what eventually as the book progresses gets categorised as schizophrenia - eventually commits suicide).

The two Doctors take different paths which rather than, as they had planned converging on some grand theory, diverge. Jacques pursues a Freudian (although Freud is strangely never mentioned) view that much illness (mental and physical) is caused by suppressed childhood trauma. Thomas (with whom the author clearly sympathises) with the idea of evolutionary psychology – and postulates a theory that the ability to hear voices was what initially gave what became modern humans their breakthrough from other competing (sub)species by enabling them to start a more organised society and that this was connected to the development of an asymmetrical brain but that this ability was lost in most people as formal written language was developed but remains in the brain as an evolutionary inheritance and failure in a section of the population which in most extreme form leads to mental illness. He believes that the Greek fables and the Old Testament trace the decline of the ability/disposition to hear voices.

Jacques failure to diagnose the cyst and rheumatic fever of a patient Kitty (who Thomas goes on to marry) leads to a rift between the two which is never properly healed, although both get frustrated as time goes on that they have failed in their aims.

There early narrative, particularly the opening of Jacques upbringing, is powerful and very well written.

There are a number of sub-narratives: Jacques in America to see cable cars in operation; Thomas in Africa tracing early humans and developing his theory; Jacques and Sonia’s son in the First World War (in a “Birdsong” like section) which actually function almost separately from the rest of the book.

However very large parts of the book consist of exposition of the author’s research – in two cases as very long (20+ pages) verbatim lectures from Jacques and Thomas outlining their respective grand theories.

This makes the book an uneasy mix of fiction and non-fiction but still was actually very well written and an enjoyable if (at times) difficult read.