2008-09-26 Human Traces

Sebastian Faulks's epic work from 2005 spans more than 600 pages in the hardback edition. Its scope is vast, and its ambition - to recap the advances and recreate the excitement of psychiatric innovations in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, all 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 and fascinates.

The story starts in 1876 in Breton, France, where an inquisitive 16 year-old, Jacques Rebiere, dissects small animals clandestinely in his bedroom, away from the prying eyes and disapproval of his strict father and disinterested stepmother. Jacques comes from a dysfunctional family - his mother died shortly after his birth, and his older brother Olivier is a schizophrenic - a condition which at that time was steeped in mistrust and 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, and his days are spent in boyish japes and reading his beloved Shakespeare.

The story follows the path of these two individuals and their families as both boys study medicine, develop an interest in the then fledgling specialty psychiatry, meet, and make plans to work together. As they follow their chosen careers, the reader is given an insight into the appalling conditions in most psychiatric hospitals in the 19th Century. Decent, altrusitic, kind doctors existed but ignorance and 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 and neurology for this amazingly accomplished novel. Theories of the experts and 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 and 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, and 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 and disturbing picture of political events and to bring the life of one of the characters to painful life.

The prose is as muscular and elegant as one would expect from Faulks. Characters are for the main part beautifully rich and complex, although a slight excess of minor characters may have contributed to Sonia, Jacques' wife, and 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 and shown the mistrust with which a theory proposing the absence of a divine creator was initially received, I found it a shame that in two parts, Faulks falls 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 and 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 and 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 and 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, and giving the rational Thomas this bizarre and inexplicable quirk only so that he can back up a little known and dubious view of the evolution of the brain seems a mistake.

Still, the overriding feel of the book is of a fascinating and compelling novel casting a searchlight into the darkest recesses of the human mind and asking some of the most profound questions about man's existence and consciousness.