I wasn't sure if I was going to like this, I picked it up in a Charity shop because i had read a couple of this author's books, so knowing the author I thought I'd give it a try. It's a strange story about two young doctors, one English and one French from disparate backgrounds who meet up by chance towards the end of the 19th century, both working in Lunatic asylums in the own counties trying to understand and treat the inmates in a respectful and humane way; on the cusp of the development of psychoanalysis. Which is a strange enough topic to put anyone off I know, however it was easy reading and kept my interest throughout following the lives of this two individuals. In the end I felt I had been on a hugely emotional experience about what really matters in life. A very thought provoking story about 'The Human Condition'. I can thoroughly recommend it.

There were aspects of this novel that I really enjoyed. I am fascinated by the subject of lunacy in literature, and the beginning of this novel promised to be something that I would really enjoy. The characters were introduced well, and the way the two main characters, Thomas and Jacques, were brought together set up the premise of the novel. Unfortunately the book lost its impetus about halfway through, getting bogged down with overly long lectures and towards the end delving into the more minor characters and leaving the main ones largely ignored. I thought that a lot of the material was superfluous to the story and my understanding of the characters in particular and, although it was mildly interesting, the fact was that there was just too much detail based on scientific thinking of the time. I would have much preferred to have read about how the first world war threw up new psychological cases for the two doctors, rather than reading about the experiences of the son on the front line. I still enjoyed the novel, but my overall impression was marred by the length and the feeling that it dragged on for too long without a satisfying conclusion. A shame, as the book is well-written and deals with complex and interesting material.

Human Traces sits alongside Birdsong as one of Faulks's masterpieces. The backdrop are the events of the last half of the 19th century and first half of the twentieth - not just the First World War, but more especially developments in science, evolution, medicine, psychiatry and psychology. The intense relationship between the two main characters is soured over a fundamental disagreement - the hubris of the worst excesses of Freudian psychobabble against the groundedness of neuropsychology. But this is not a book of abstruse theorizing. It is illuminated by matters personal: emotional, psychological and neurological problems in the central families.

I have heard that some academics are sniffy about this novel. Faulks is perceived as having overreached himself by making, through his characters, so many profound pronouncements on human psychology. Take no notice. This is a rich, complex, engrossing reflection on the human condition.

You can watch my full review of this great book on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/PkjZgX3oEzI
‘Human Traces’ follows three main characters through their lives from children and young adults, into their adventures and achievements of adulthood, and then into old age with its wisdom and disappointments, with lots of nice detail throughout that kept the story enjoyable. It was not the most thrilling book I’ve ever read although the characters seemed solid, if a bit convenient. The book is convincingly set in the Victorian era and there was a lot of attention to detail to make it realistic.
The main characters are Jacques, who is French, and Thomas and Sonia who are brother and sister and are English. The characters journey through the European scientific studies of mental illness. Jacques comes from a more scientific background and Thomas from more philosophical interests. Sonia is intelligent but more concerned with being a home maker.
The two men are passionate about curing mental illness, in particular what we nowadays call schizophrenia. They want to do what they can to help people suffering from mental illness and they both look at the directions from physical science and also causes which you cannot see. The physical causes are things such as looking for lesions on the brain that could represent specific mental illnesses and performing autopsies on patients to look for signs which can explain the illnesses further. The causes of mental illness which you cannot see that the two men investigate are theories of inheritance, how trauma can be a cause, and also how talking therapies can help to uncover and resolve issues, they also investigate the use of hypnosis and dreams in analysing causes. They explore how things described as mentally sourced can bring on physical ailments, and how physical issues can bring on mental ailments. It was very interesting, this is such a vast area and as much as ideas have moved on in the last hundred years, I don’t think we’re any closer to really understanding mental illness or knowing the best way to deal with it.
The characters travel around Europe absorbing the medical theories of the day. The book was literally bursting with names of eminent scientists and doctors of that period. The late 19th century was a very busy time for science and discovery in Europe, it was a time when anything felt achievable and many people made great leaps in their thinking. Sometimes ideas were misguided and there is much that has been left to that era to be forgotten, there is also much that has been built upon to further knowledge and understanding.
Alongside this scientific exploit, the book also covers the personal lives of the characters, their relationships and disappointments that come with age and it was a very engaging and charming story. This book is long, I don’t just mean how many pages it has, it also spans a lot of years. We see the men starting out as children and young adults coming from their different directions. We see their optimism and energy, and we see them get older, despondent at times and aged.
This book also explores ‘the art of living’, of being able to recognise the everyday extended rapture that accompanies our lives; children, our partners, family and friends, they are really the places where we find most joy. Thomas and Sonia are positive people who enjoy life and make the best of whatever comes their way. Sonia in particular has a ‘get on with it’ attitude, she accepts what is in front of her and makes the best of it. Compared to Jacques who cannot seem to be happy, particularly as he gets older and his mind lingers on past regrets.
After university, Thomas works in an asylum and realises the problem of numbers when it comes to helping people with madness. The asylums house people with mental health problems, as well as people with what we would today call severe learning difficulties, and people who are physically disabled or misplaced in society; so, it is a mix of people with complex and very different needs. Thomas is left wanting to do more, but he is restrained by the problems of over crowding and the lack of reliable cures.
Jacques on the other side of the Channel studies in the Salpêtrière in Paris and has contact with many leading scientists in the field of mental health, such as Charcot, Gilles de la Tourette, and Janet.
Once qualified and after some frugal time generating funds, the men then set up their own retreat in the Carinthian mountains. Whilst they are able to take in some more severe cases, most of the people who stay at the Seeblick Schloss are paying guests with more minor problems. They convert a basement into a space to perform autopsies to learn more about the brain and its workings. The two men work hard and are successful in their business venture, although they are less successful in their aims to find a direct cause or cure for mental illness. Whilst they continue to be interested and passionate about the human mind and its workings, their paths diverge as they mature and live their lives in different ways.
I thought Sonia’s pregnancy was beautifully handled by Faulks, many of Sonia’s feelings about her baby brought me to tears because they were so true in a way that science has never come close to understanding. There is a feeling when you have a baby to look after that this is life, this is really living and nothing else compares to it. ‘I feel I know him already…I have known him all my life, since I was a child. He has been there since before I was born.’ So beautiful and it expresses how much we do not understand about life, or the nature of living.
The tone of the book changed a lot as it followed Daniel’s war experience, and this showed the social changes of the time. The passage of ages and time was also expressed well through Thomas’s daughters, as well as earlier in the story by Jacques, Thomas and Sonia’s parents and Dr. Faverill.
‘Human Traces’ was exceptionally well written, a lot of effort has been made to make the details of the story authentic. As someone who enjoys writing I am in awe of the quality of writing in this book. It was very well researched in terms of the ideas and people of the time, as well as the correct particulars of life from that era, and it was a very enjoyable story. There was a good use of language, keeping in the spirit of the Victorian period but slimmed down for more modern to the point reading.
‘Human Traces’ was a lovely reading experience with likeable characters with interesting lives that includes an impressive knowledge of Victorian science and study of the human mind. It was a very long book, but at no time did I find it hard work, and I was disappointed as it came to an end because I felt I had become invested in the lives of the main characters.
You can watch my full review of this great book on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/PkjZgX3oEzI

2.75?

the actual story was interesting and well developed but I despised the 700 medical descriptions and endless pages of lectures

Oh dear. This is one of the most unfortunate books I've read in quite some time. Sebastian Faulks has a name in popular historical fiction and Human Traces, which seemed to promise a fascinating tale of two 19th century pioneers of psychiatry - a subject I have a strong interest in - gave me high hopes for a quality read. It is clear that Faulks is a functional writer who knows how to construct a novel, but while the subject has obviously been meticulously researched I found the prose somewhat bland - even dull. Our view into the subject of mental healthcare is quite interesting - but that stands in strong contrast to the characters, which largely lack life and dimension. The narrative is increasing boring as the book progresses, and one becomes frustrated with a group of characters who seem little more than mannequins which gesture feebly to historical observations. Ultimately, the story really goes nowhere and there is a lack of any kind of satisfying conclusion, or enlightenment about its subject. As if Faulks himself grew bored of the book, an ill-fitting sub-plot relating to the Great War is shoehorned in towards the end, and while this was more engaging than the rest of the story, it is a case of far too little and far too late. At 609 pages, perhaps this story would have worked better had it been half its length. I couldn't recommend this novel to anyone.

Human Traces is a a huge and ambitious novel, which aims to explore the development of psychiatry, psychoanalysis and neurology in the late 19th and early 20th century. It took Sebastian Faulks five years to write, and involved spending hundreds of hours on research and creating charts and timelines to keep track of events and characters.

The novel begins in the 1876, with the introduction of the two protagonists - Jacques Rebiere and Thomas Midwinter. They are both 16 years old, and although separated by social status, language and land, they both undergo personal experiences which make them wish to become doctors. Jacques is a poor boy living in rural France, forced to abandon his education and an early age and work in the villages to support his family. Jacques is fascinated with anatomy and dissects frogs in his spare time, drawing detailed illustrations. But what he most wishes for is to understand madness: he wishes to be able to cure his brother, Olivier, who succumbed into it and is forced to live locked in the stable, shackled to the wall. Oliver was the last person to have seen their mother, as she died shortly after giving birth to Jacques. Their father refuses to talk about his late wife, and Jacques sees in Oliver the only chance to learn anything about her.
In England, Thomas Midwinter dreams to study Shakespeare andbelieves that literature allows for understanding of humanity. For Thomas, literature deepens the perceivement of emotions and heightens one's awareness of being alive. He is met with scorn from his father, who is experiencing financial troubles and is forced to arrange a marriage for Thomas's sister, Sonia. It is Sonia who advises Thomas to study medicine, as itwill also allow him to study the nature of humanity...and guarantee a respectable income.

These early sections show Faulks at his very best; they're compelling and evocative. full of humanity and wonder. Although the hardships which Jacques faces are overwhelming, he never gives up: his devotion to knowledge and understanding is admirable and beautifully shown, and his love for his brother and the mother he never saw compensates for all sacrifices. Thomas is forced to abandon his dreams of studying literature, like his sister is forced to enter into marriage; both will have to shape their lives this way and not the other because of the place and time they were born in. When the lives of Jacques and Thomas intersect, both discover that the other shares the same fascination: both pledge to pursue further understanding of the human condition and all that comes with it, and eventually set up their own clinic. With time, each begins to form a different hypothesis: Jacques believes that traumatic experiences at a young age can are the cause of madness and schizophrenia, while Thomas remains a strict naturalist and believes that mental and physical problems are genetic.

This is fascinating material, and the novel promises to be a wonderful experience. Sally Vickers in The Times compared it to works by Balzac, Stendhal and Mann, praising its scope and ambition - the novel's canvas encompasses three continents. It spans several decades and generations, and is victorian in its lenght and drama: from sweeping love affairs to tragic death, journeys to faraway lands and even war and its tragedy, all this with exploration of scientific, religious and philosophical themes.

Yet, as a novel, it is greatly flawed. The main sin it commits against the art of storytelling is the sheer amount of exposition: after the brilliant opening it lapses into a display of its impressive background research, with the characters becoming little more than speakers for the author who illustrate his points; several chapters are devoted to long and academic discussion over the nature of mental illness, and in one chapter a whole lecture is transcribed from beginning to end. These chapters could have been edited and shortened to a portion of their lenght; the pace and dramatic impact of the narrative would greatly gain from such treatment. Likewise, the portions of the novel set in Africa and California seem to be more of a recounting of the research that went into writing them than genuine parts of the storyline; the plot starts looking as if the story was so framed to fit the background research - which would explain several improbable coincidences - than the research resulting from the nature of the story and the characters which populate it, moving very linearly and mostly predictably and perfunctorily. It's as if the sheer amount of ideas was too large for its canvas, forcing Faulks to cut his characterization short in order to present psychoanalysis and psychiatry with the attention and detail he felt it deserved.

The novel shines with insividual sequences - descriptions of mental asylums and the patients within them are haunting and effective, with one feeling their squalor and despair - but on the whole the plot and character interactions feel scripted, the novel's world tailored only to present its themes and not allowed to evolve and live on its own. Still, despite these factors it's not a failure: it is an intelligent work, and the author's devotion to the subject and representation of science from that period, with its many doubts but also enormous promise, is to be acknowleged and praised. The novel begins to regain the opening grandeur as it nears towards the end, with events which I found bitterly ironic and deeply saddening. The end of Human Traces is powerful and sublime, written in passages echoing with quiet beauty. It's almost cathartic in effect, purifying the artificual plot with truly human emotions; I closed the book forgiving it its flawed and weak parts, being glad that I was able to experience the strong and beautiful.

The final four pages of this book almost make up for the detours into the history of psychiatry. Lots to think about in this long and heavy book. Where was the editor? We continue to ask the same questions about the treatment and cure of mental illness. We are still floundering. Years from now we will look back at the accepted best practice for schizophrenia and shake our heads asking can you believe that was considered helpful. Perhaps it is enough, as one patient reminded Thomas, to help those as gently as you can and to truly do no harm.

Questo romanzo, lo ammetto, mi mette in difficoltà: se, da una parte, mi è piaciuto molto, dall’altra ho riscontrato diversi difetti che non mi hanno permesso di apprezzarlo del tutto.

La storia, sin dalla trama, mi aveva attirata subito e mi aveva spinto a comprare il libro, mentre vagavo nell’aeroporto di Manchester, aspettando il mio volo: la psichiatria, i primi passi della neurologia e tutto ciò che, in sintesi, riguarda lo studio della mente umana, sono argomenti di incredibile interesse per me.
Lo sono anche, evidentemente, per l’autore, che nel parlare dei passi avanti fatti da queste discipline inserisce alcuni dei passaggi più interessanti del libro; tuttavia, è proprio questo amore preponderante per la materia di studio che, in parte, ha affossato un poco il romanzo. Infatti, per quanto piuttosto ben delineati, i personaggi sembrano “succubi” della materia, e non in modo positivo: ovvero, questa “dipendenza” non porta ad un loro approfondimento, ma solo ad un approfondimento della materia stessa. Mi spiego meglio: per quanto uno sviluppo caratteriale dei personaggi ci sia, visto che il romanzo li segue dall’infanzia alla vecchiaia, è una crescita “bidimensionale”, che non porta ad affezionarsi in modo particolare a loro e che, in sintesi, serve all’autore più per dare sostegno alle teorie sulla psichiatria e sulla neurologia da lui narrate, piuttosto che fungere da “impalcatura” per l’imbastimento di personaggi a tutto tondo.

Thomas e Jacques, infatti, sono personaggi tratteggiati, ma che sembrano non riuscire a raggiungere totalmente il lettore; e tutti coloro che li circondano, di conseguenza, risultano anche più difficili da cogliere. Non che non ci siano le basi – come ho detto, non sono totalmente piatti – semplicemente, non fanno “il salto di qualità”. Un chiaro esempio di questo è Sonia, sorella di Thomas, che riesce a spiccare negli ultimi capitoli del romanzo ma, per il resto, sembra sempre un po’ troppo “scialba”; o l’Abbé Henri, che avrebbe potuto essere una grande figura di mentore.
Gli unici punti in cui ho trovato personaggi completi e tridimensionali sono nelle prime pagine dedicate a Thomas, legate alla sua infanzia, e nelle ultime, legate alla sua senilità (che mi hanno colpita molto, davvero); poi, alcune pagine riguardanti i primi passi nell’età adulta di Jacques (ad esempio, gli studi alla Salpêtrière – famoso ospedale di Parigi) e le ultime pagine del libro, legate a Sonia Midwinter. Non ho invece apprezzato lo sviluppo di Jacques da circa pagina 600 in poi – io l’ho interpretata come crisi di mezz’età più che come lotta contro il dolore, quindi forse è per questo che non ho apprezzato moltissimo la svolta. Anche l’entrata in scena di Kitty, paziente di Jacques, mi è sembrata parecchio forzata.
Inoltre, il rapporto tra Jacques e Thomas è sondato in maniera non del tutto soddisfacente – certo, non è sempre idilliaco, ha alti e bassi, cresce e si sviluppa seguendo il loro percorso psicologico e lavorativo, eppure… Vi dirò la verità, non so spiegare come mai la descrizione di questa amicizia mi abbia lasciata così poco convinta. Forse perché, in un punto particolare del libro (che non descriverò per non rovinare la lettura altrui) ho trovato un cambiamento repentino troppo poco credibile.

Altra cosa che non mi ha fatto impazzire sono i cambi di scenario. Come si evince dalla quarta di copertina, i nostri viaggeranno in diversi luoghi – tra cui l’Africa e la California. Ebbene, scenari così intriganti e perfetti per stuzzicare la curiosità del lettore sono trattati un po’ banalmente. Della traversata africana leggiamo molte cose, ma non “vediamo” nulla; almeno, io non sono riuscita a “vedere” la Rift Valley, né la savana. Stessa solfa per quella californiana. Invece, la descrizione della campagna inglese, della Parigi dei tempi (o meglio, dei sanatori della città) e dei monti tedesco-austriaci mi è piaciuta – mi è parsa più sentita e sono riuscita, appunto, a “vedere” ciò che veniva descritto.

Tuttavia, c’è da dire che queste mancanze si notano solo quando si pensa al libro a posteriori: durante la lettura, infatti, lo stile di Faulks assorbe quasi totalmente l’attenzione e porta chi legge, con grande pacatezza, nei meandri degli studi psichiatrici – argomento non facile, come si può immaginare. In questo va il mio plauso, quindi, all’autore, che in questo senso (contrariamente a quanto ho scritto prima, riguardo ai paesaggi) mostra grandi capacità descrittive, bilanciando informazioni più storico-tecniche e considerazioni più attinenti allo svolgersi della trama; eppure, non basta per risollevare del tutto il romanzo, anche perché in due occasioni viene lasciato troppo spazio al discorso scientifico-tecnico che, per quanto interessante, risulta alla lunga pesantuccio (soprattutto quando viene posto sotto forma di discorso diretto, anzi, di vero e proprio monologo).
Ma tornando alle cose che mi sono piaciute, devo dire che ho adorato il capitolo scritto secondo il punto di vista di Olivier (il fratello di Jacques), anche se all’inizio mi ha mandato davvero in confusione, e ho apprezzato anche la capacità dell’autore di descrivere il dolore, la sofferenza dovuta alla perdita, sia di persone care, sia della fiducia in quello che ci attende. Sono parti toccanti che, come ho già detto, testimoniano la bravura stilistica di Faulks, che si destreggia tra periodo piuttosto lunghi (come potrete notare dalle citazioni in fondo) con una grazia ammirevole.

Ciò che questo libro lascia, sostanzialmente, è un interessantissimo approfondimento sulla psichiatria e sulla neurologia, una montagna di concetti su cui riflettere molto a lungo perché legati a dubbi che, sul finire, legano lettore e protagonisti e appartengono all’umanità intera; ma il tutto si protrae troppo, tra l’altro portando in scena troppi personaggi (qui si che sarebbe valso il detto “meglio pochi ma buoni”).

Se questa recensione vi è sembrata confusa è perché, mannaggia, lo sono anche io; avevo molte aspettative, lo ammetto, e ora non so bene cosa mi rimane, dentro, di questo libro. Ho riflettuto davvero a lungo sul voto da assegnargli, perché oscillo continuamente tra le due e le tre stelline, con un voto che in decimali cambia solo di mezzo punto. Alla fine, con la promessa di leggere altro di Faulks – per gustare ancora il suo stile, per vedere se i difetti qui notati sono un’eccezione o la regola – mi ritrovo ad assegnare solo due stelline, nella speranza che l’autore sappia stupirmi piacevolmente in futuro!

Mad doctoring

Just finished reading this book by Sebastian Faulks, one of my favourite British authors. I read it on my Christmas hol and totally loved it. A riveting story (likeable, rounded characters loving and feuding, experiencing joy, sorrow, life and death), and the book has lots of ideas and theories about the nature of human consciousness, ideas which are set in the context of insanity - the male protagonists are mad-doctors (their phrase) in the late 19th Century. It was Faulks' novel Engelby, which I read about 5 years ago, that first got me interested in this subject.
Basically the main character posits the theory that man, in his less evolved state (the early days of homo sapiens) was universally what we would now term schizophrenic: he heard voices, the voices of his "gods", who told him what to do. Brief research revealed to me that Faulks' ideas here are at least in part based on work concerning bicameralism, for which in particular a man called Julian Jaynes is responsible. According to this theory, gradually, through the process of evolution and/or environmental change, which led to farming and more complex social organisation, the voices "stopped", because man had become more self-reliant. He had become aware of himself as opposed to being an agent of the voices in his head. When the voices stopped, they were replaced by what Faulks' protagonist describes as "a toy theatre in man's head" - with an "I", a facile (linear) presentation of time and space which enabled him to project an imagined version of himself into the future and/or in a different place. Thus consciousness was born, an event which the Bible seeks to represent in the symbolic imagery of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and paleontologists in the Rift Valleys of Northern Tanzania look for in factual, evidenced terms.

The people who now hear voices do not, of course fit into our modern society, which is why we call them "mad", a term that is ultimately utterly subjective. That the voices in their heads are completely real to them - as real, if not more so, than the voices of "seen-people", is self-evident. Tragically, there is often a voice that says: "Kill yourself", and many sufferers do actually do this.

I must admit I got a little lost in the mad-doctor's evidence for all this (that early man was schizophrenic). There was stuff about the consistent incidence of the condition in all peoples and cultures, suggesting that there was strong genetic presence, and that if that was the case, why had the gene survived natural selection if there was no apparent advantage to its presence? Answer: it is like the blind bat's remnant eye that evolution has not yet eradicated. This was correlated by the idea that sufferers from schizophrenia - because they carry the gene of our voice-hearing forebears which enabled consciousness and language - are the people that in a sense pay the price for our dizzyingly high success as a species. Consciousness could only exist if the voices had been there first as their precursor. Replacing the voices meant consciousness and the ability to analyse and shape our environment. Consciousness, 'the ability to tell a story to ourselves', as one of the protagonists puts it, could only evolve (in Darwinian terms) as a replacement for, and on the shoulders of (to borrow Einstein's phrase), the giants who heard the voices.

Well now. His - and Jaynses' - evidence for all this is admittedly scant. They cite the differences between the texts of the Iliad and the Odyssey - written (actually: recited) a few centuries apart but with very decidedly different mental perspectives (couldn't this just be a consciously altered narrative position rather than a newly evolved human brain for everybody?). They examine the higher incidence of inner voices ('hearing their gods') amongst the older prophets in the Old Testamant, like Amos. (Again, this is at best speculative, surely - the writing of the Bible was highly selective: why couldn't there have been just as few voice-hearers then as now, just that in those times people like Amos were listened to and not locked up in their own filth in asylums as they were in late 19th century Victorian England? Definitions of madness are conditional on societies' norms and values, after all.

A fascinating question arises out of this for me: Did modern religion emerge out of (the absence of) these voices? The voices were the gods that told early humans what to do, but when they stopped, we mourned this loss (Faulks repeatedly refers to Psalm 121: I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help., which he sees as early man's despair that the voices had stopped. Thus: is our modern version of religion, with its emphasis on prayer and struggling to "listen" to God, and relying on faith to fill the gap which was in our early sapiens days not a gap at all, but a real voice, as real as our brains could make it, and schizophrenics do HEAR voices - in their "imagination", yes, but that's what consciousness is... is modern, theistically based religion actually an irrelevant anachronism, a yearning for something that is no longer there and we cannot come to terms with its loss? Certainly the more advanced a society gets (OK, principally in materialistic terms "advanced", but that's what progress is, material comfort freeing us up to think and develop and invent and improve things), the more advanced we are, the more irrelevant religion seems to be to most of us. Is "God" dead? Did he ever exist? Or is it maybe simply the case that although we seem to miss the guiding voices, we are only in an interim stage and will "get over it" once we evolve a skill or sense or aid that is more stable and effective in the fight to survive and prosper? Something like consciousness, but better and even more enabling? Fascinating ideas!

Anyway, although I feel I haven't really done justice to the ideas in the novel here, I just loved the book, and I thought a lot about conversations I have had with friends about the differences (and similarities) between fact and belief - they all being subject to our consciousness. Reading it convinced me of both the sad limitations of our consciousness (the 'toy theatre in our heads') and - more optimistically and realistically - of the importance of context. Just because we are so tragically aware of our insignificance (Faulks says something like "each of us but a tiny flash of light between the eternal darkness of the past and that of the future", this does not render our lives meaningless (unless we let it do so). We have worries, cares, responsibilities, emotions. We are caught up in a world that matters to us. We are ambitious, we are bereaved when we lose loved ones, and it must be so. Despite, or maybe because of our knowledge that our consciousness is so imperfect. Perhaps we really will evolve a seventh sense that will enable us to see and achieve much more. For it is accepted scientific fact (if such a thing exists, and I definitely need to believe it does, or I cannot function! Darwin is extensively cited in the novel on this point, obviously), it is accepted fact that we have evolved and that we continue to do so.

I found Human Traces to be an enormously intellectually stimulating book, as well as a riveting story. I like that combination very much. I like the fact that Faulks is a trained and experienced journalist - it adds the power of research and fact to the creativity of fiction. Dickens was the same, and I see Faulks as very much in the great man's literary tradition.

Stolen from the book shelf at home. Brilliantly conceived, researched and executed. One for the science history nerds. Slightly let down by the female characters.

Unnecessarily detailed and tedious in parts. Takes far to long to reach a point that by the time you've got the gist of what's going on, you've lost the will to live. Still, an interesting read on the histories of psychology (albeit mostly fictitious). Wouldn't read again. Let's hope this is never made into some dead-in-the-water BBC costume drama.