Human Traces

Human Traces is a 2005 novel by Sebastian Faulks, best known as the British author of Birdsong and Charlotte Gray. The novel took Faulks five years to write. It tells of two friends who set up a pioneering asylum in 19th-century Austria, in tandem with the evolution of psychiatry and the start of World War I.

Plot summary

Template:Spoiler Human Traces charts the progress of psychoanalytical thought in the late Victorian period at a time when psychoanalysis and psychiatry were developing their different explanations for mental disorders and traces the intertwined lives of Doctors Thomas Midwinter, who is English, and Jacques Rebière, from Brittany, France. Jacques and Thomas meet as teenagers in 1880 when Thomas holidays in France with his sister Sonia and her husband. Jacques and Thomas come from very different backgrounds, but instantly become friends as both have burning ambitions to become doctors. In particular, they are fascinated by the way the mind works. Jacques has a particular interest in the subject because his older brother Olivier has a mental illness, the symptoms of which have progressively worsened as he has grown up. Olivier is plagued by voices in his head; Jacques refers to this as 'Olivier's disease', although the reader is likely to recognise it as schizophrenia.

The novel records the attempt by Jacques and Thomas to understand the mind and the cause of mental illness. Their ultimate aim is to discover what makes us human. The novel spans almost fifty years and contains much detail about the psychiatric environment of the day. Jacques marries Sonia after she is cruelly divorced by her first husband, and the three of them establish their own clinic for mental illness in Austria. The Schloss Seeblick sanatorium becomes well known, and Thomas and Jacques are able to observe their patients and discover much about the mind. The pair never find a cure for madness, but they move humanity along in its quest for understanding of the human mind. Thomas never discovers what it is that makes us human, but throughout the novel there is a suggestion that mental illness may be part of the price humans pay for being human at all.

Whilst some have criticised Human Traces as excessively expository, detailed and didactic, it has also been considered wide ranging, ambitious and well written. It is certainly long (the Hutchinson paperback is more than 600pp) and has enjoyed commercial success, having been a bestseller in the United Kingdom.

Faulks himself says of his novel:

Human Traces was a Sisyphean task. After spending five years in libraries reading up on madness, psychiatry and psychoanalysis (my office had charts and timelines and things plastered all over the walls), the act of finishing it felt like a bereavement.

Background to the novel

Human Traces is a meticulously detailed novel that sets out to illustrate the advances in cognitive psychology during the late Victorian era. Faulks has stated that he doesn't know what motivated him to write a novel about mental illness. However, he has commented in an interview that ‘there's no doubt that the hearing of voices is much more common than we generally acknowledge, and I don't think it's necessarily a sign of being mad'.

The psychiatric research that Faulks puts into his novel pays off. Over the course of his investigation, Faulks was able to gain access to Broadmoor, the hospital for the criminally insane which stands at the top of the valley above the private college where Faulks went to school.

Faulks himself experienced hearing voices (something which also prompte him to write his latest novel, Engleby):

It was a classic case of being in stress after our second child had been born. I thought I heard my wife's voice screaming for me. It was not in my head, it was not just on the other side of the room, it was up the stairs. I had been deeply asleep, I leapt up, and went up the stairs - there was nothing.'

This experience makes its way into the novel, and shows Faulks' long term interest in the subject of psychiatric illnesses, especially as his mother, Pamela Faulks, had a nervous breakdown when he was a child.

External Links

• The Guardian, 'All in the Mind'
• The Telegraph, 04.09.2005, 'Faulks: a Tolstoy for today',[[4]]