Fiction: Sebastian Faulks is probably best known for the trilogy that began with The Girl at the Lion d'Or, set in the 1930s, continued with Birdsong, set in the first World War, and concluded with Charlotte Gray, set in the second World War. In keeping with this tradition, Human Traces opens in 1870 and takes us toward and through the first World War. Reviewed by Christine Dwyer Hickey
Considering the sheer scope and breadth of this work, which weighs in at a hefty 624 pages and took four years to complete, Faulks has to be commended for his stamina.
His strength has always been the ability to imagine his way into the past via the minds and hearts of his characters. In the background, war or the promise of war might provide the mood and scenery, but it has always been the human aspect that has brought such power to his novels. Indeed, at the outset this promises to be a very human, if slightly predictable, story.
Two young men - one English, one French, both medical students - meet while on holidays in Deauville. Thomas Midwinter comes from the comfortable Lancashire background of the merchant classes, while Jacques Rebiere's credentials are rather more brutal - skinflint and unfeeling father, mother who died as a result of his birth, and most heartbreaking of all, an older brother who suffers from the condition yet to become known as schizophrenia. Olivier is his older brother - once a normal and happy boy, he now lives as an animal in the stable.
Thomas also has a sibling, Sonia, who is probably the most interesting character in the novel. When the two boys meet she has recently been sold off in a marriage deal, and will be bartered once again, this time in reverse, when her father buys her back from her husband and thus unwittingly leaves her free to marry Jacques.
Back to the two young aspiring medics then, who, on a beach in Deauville, somewhere in the middle of the night, pledge to make a joint venture of the quest for what they come to refer to as "the way in which functions the mind of a human". Then they temporarily part, Thomas to England and the harsh, unforgiving world of the lunatic asylum, and Jacques to the equally gruesome post-mortem tables of the Salpêtrière in Paris.
So far so promising - and then something happens to irrevocably alter the tone of the novel. The characters begin to fade into the background and the real hero emerges: the subject of psychiatry. From then on any human involvement will be to act as server or bearer to this demanding and often overwhelming subject matter. Even the dialogue will bend to suit its will.
It is always a temptation for a novelist to share with the reader the endless drudgery of extensive research, whether or not the reader wants it, or indeed the novel requires it. Faulks has succumbed to this temptation without the slightest sign of a struggle. Entire lectures are reported verbatim, theories are thrown at us with dizzying speed. Frankly, it's enough to stun all but the most enthusiastic of amateur psychiatrists.
When Faulks does step away from the podium, however, he is superb, and few writers can deal with the subject of love quite so convincingly. All sorts of love - brother for hopelessly insane brother, mother for child, man for a woman. Such relationships are expertly and exquisitely handled.
He is also an unusually physical writer, for example in the descriptions of landscapes - and there are plenty of those to keep him going: Brittany, Paris, east Africa, the US, the splendid isolation of the Austrian Alps. He gives a vivid and realistic account of a woman giving birth and rarely have I read such a powerful account of the physical trauma brought on by grief.
If the function of a novel is to allow us access to the life or lives of others where, as unseen guests, we can draw our own conclusions, feel our own thoughts, and perhaps learn a little something along the way, then Human Traces can only be less than successful. Relying too heavily on scholarship, it comes across as didactic, the narrative is sacrificed and ultimately the reader is excluded.
Christine Dwyer Hickey is a novelist. The Dancer, the first part of The Dublin Trilogy, has recently been reissued by New Island.
Human Traces: A Novel. By Sebastian Faulks, Hutchinson, 624pp. £17.99