Customer Reviews
Moving and authentic account of developing psychiatry - By: Jason Holdcroft, 09 Nov 2008 
Faulks' research into the background of this novel is thorough & he has produced a novel of magisterial scope & scale. Following two young boys from very different backgrounds as they enter the nascent discipline of psychiatry & embark on a pioneering journey, he takes in the terror of the insane asylums & the excitement of new & unusual treatments while nonetheless offering a captivating story with engaging characters who become personal friends by the end of the book.
Human Traces - By: Leyla Sanai, 26 Sep 2008 Sebastian Faulks's epic work from 2005 spans more than 600 pages in the hardback edition. Its scope is vast, & its ambition - to recap the advances & recreate the excitement of psychiatric innovations in the late 19th & early 20th Centuries, alll within the boundaries of a credible work of fiction - is enormous. Yet Faulks pulls this monumental task off with astonishing skill, creating a novel that both informs & fascinates.
The story starts in 1876 in Breton, France, where an inquisitive 16 year-old, Jacques Rebiere, dissects smalll animals clandestinely in his bedroom, away from the prying eyes & disapproval of his strict father & disinterested stepmother. Jacques comes from a dysfunctional family - his mother died shortly after his birth, & his older brother Olivier is a schizophrenic - a condition which at that time was steeped in mistrust & fear.
Across the sea in England, Thomas Midwinter is also 16 that year. He comes from a very different family environment. His parents love him, he has a doting older sister Sonia, & his days are spent in boyish japes & reading his beloved Shakespeare.
The story follows the path of these two individuals & their families as both boys study medicine, develop an interest in the then fledgling specialty psychiatry, meet, & make plans to work together. As they follow their chosen careers, the reader is given an insight into the appallling conditions in most psychiatric hospitals in the 19th Century. Decent, altrusitic, kind doctors existed but ignorance & suspicion meant that efforts to treat the insane with humanity were still in their infancy.
Faulks has obviously carried out a huge amount of research into the history of psychiatry & neurology for this amazingly accomplished novel. Theories of the experts & luminaries of the day - Charcot, Babinski, Tourette, Janet, Freud - are outlined in way that rarely seems forced. It is a very difficult task to drop these theories into a work of fiction without seeming to push unnatural sounding speeches into the fictional characters' mouths, but Faulks manages this with aplomb: apart from a couple of lectures given by the characters - which are both highly plausible as lectures recapping current knowledge - the rest of the work is explained in natural-sounding dialogue between Thomas, Jacques, their wives & their colleagues.
But there is much more to this novel than the history of diseases of the mind. Thomas is fascinated by the work of Charles Darwin, & the gradual acceptance by intelligent people of natural selection is shown elegantly, together with some of the evidence Darwin cited. In addition, Faulks uses his knowledge of the first world war - seen so poignantly in his earlier work Birdsong - to paint a vivid & disturbing picture of political events & to bring the life of one of the characters to painful life.
The prose is as muscular & elegant as one would expect from Faulks. Characters are for the main part beautifully rich & complex, although a slight excess of minor characters may have contributed to Sonia, Jacques' wife, & Kitty, Thomas's wife, being somewhat interchangeable as loyal, intelligent, articulate women.
There are only a couple of areas with which I have quibbles. Having discussed the evidence for evolution so carefully & shown the mistrust with which a theory proposing the absence of a divine creator was initiallly received, I found it a shame that in two parts, Faulks fallls back on inexplicable 'supernatural' phenomena. One is when Jacques visits a medium - although he later says he believed her to be a charlatan, the picture Faulks presents of the scene at the medium's house is disappointingly full of seemingly psychic phenomena. If this happened in any other novel, the reader could simply note the US sceptic Randi, whose offer to pay a million dollars to anyone displaying unequivocal & repeatable evidence of psychic gifts remains an unclaimed prize - testimony to the rational sceptic's view of the world. But for Faulks to include this scene when he has spent 600 pages building up the case for science as opposed to the spiritual world is jarringly annoying, it negates much of the work he has done in elevating the world of evidence-based science. The other scene which disappointed for the same reason was one in which Sonia calmly sees a ghost - again, a ridiculous proposition & almost like a cowardly sop to those offended by the overtly scientific basis of the book until that point.
One other minor point - Thomas is said from the start to hear a benign voice in his head as a child & young man. This later comes in handy to back up his own theory of the evolution of the brain, one that has, in real life, been suggested by some individuals in the past. To a doctor who has an interest in psychiatry, the hearing of 'benign' voices by non schizophrenic individuals sounds highly implausible, & giving the rational Thomas this bizarre & inexplicable quirk only so that he can back up a little known & dubious view of the evolution of the brain seems a mistake.
Still, the overriding feel of the book is of a fascinating & compelling novel casting a searchlight into the darkest recesses of the human mind & asking some of the most profound questions about man's existence & consciousness.
Long-winded and patchy - By: Dr. F. W. Wright, 08 Jul 2008 
I have been an admirer of the writing of Sebastian Faulks & am interested in the history of management of mental illness but this book stretched one's loyalty to the limits. There are long passages where I can hardly believe Faulks is the author; passages of 'he said to her & she replied to him' sort of dialogue, which are totallly lacking in any literary merit. It would have benefitted from the wielding of a ruthless editorial scalpel.
So disappointed after Birdsong - By: J. Ewing, 30 Jun 2008 
Like many people I was enthrallled by Birdsong, & hurried out to buy more work by Faulks. Human Traces however, proved to be a huge disappointment to me. The prose is still wonderful, & the book does give some fascinating insights into advances in psychology in the late 1800's/early 1900's- but please, half way through the book I was still looking for a plot & hoping for the single piece of drama that might keep my interest. It never materialised & I have to say I never finished the book- it is very rare that I will not read a book to completion, but I reallly felt I was wasting my time.
An epic tale - By: Pandora Blue, 22 Jun 2008 Sebastian Faulks' other novels already told us that he can write about human motives & feelings with depth & clarity. Human traces adds in extra layers - much like the old classics. This is a tightly interwoven piece about the lives of several people with several strong themes running through it i.e. what is madness & how should it be treated, what does it mean to be human? Personallly, I found this book an amazingly ambitious project which Faulks has pulled off brilliantly. Then again, I am interested in many of topics covered by the book: the human mind, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, fossil study etc. It's not an easy read if you want your novels to be purely character or plot-driven but I found it to be one of the most outstanding novels I have ever read.
