Sebastian Faulks: Human Traces

"People in battle are finding out what it means to be human," Sebastian Faulks once said of the attraction to the novelist in writing about war.

In Human Traces he has left battle behind, although not, as it will turn out, entirely. And it is an oddity — and one that points to a difficulty with his new, hefty tome — that it is the battlefield scene which stands out in a novel more ostensibly about a pair of 19th-century psychiatrists engaged in attempting to find out what it means to be human.

The two are Frenchman Jacques Rebiere and Englishman Thomas Midwinter, who meet on a holiday when they are both 16. This is a meeting of minds, even at that young age, and the boys make a connection and a pact of sorts.

They are not alike, except in that they are interested in the ways of the mind. Jacques lives a rough, almost brutal existence with his horrible father, a distant stepmother and a mad brother who is kept, tied up like a wild animal, in a shed. This brother, Oliver, represents a fading memory of their dead mother, and of Jacques' interest in what defines madness and sanity, and how these conditions might be treated.

Thomas is a bright boy, slightly fey, a good man who loves his sister Sonia. The two boys grow up and go on to become eminent mind doctors: they set up a successful asylum for the mad or merely hysterical in the Austrian mountains. Jacques marries Sonia, after she escapes a first, sour marriage. Thomas marries Kitty, one of the many women of the period who turned up at such places seeking asylum from the conditions to which women of the Victorian age were thought to be susceptible. Jacques has mis-diagnosed Kitty and writes a research paper about her symptoms — which he puts down to sexual maladjustment. Thomas realises that her condition is medical. This creates the first rift between the men and it is the women who keep the business running while the men go their separate, theoretical ways. It is here, in the depiction of friendships and relationships and the sense of loss when these go awry, where Faulks is so good.

And these relationships are interesting enough, but what a long time it takes to get them anywhere. The book suffers, almost sinks actually, under the sheer weight of research which Faulks seems to have found too fascinating to condense or fictionalise.

There are pages of the stuff, medical lectures and descriptions of psychiatry which would no doubt have riveted these two characters had they been real. The reader in search of a novel is unlikely to be so keenly studious. What you are left with, despite the book's breadth and bulk, are mere traces of the humanity of the writer's characters.

* Michele Hewitson is a Herald features writer.