I’ve always enjoyed reading Sebastian Faulks and had high hopes for Human Traces, a story about the lives and loves, hopes and ambitions, turmoil and anguish of Jacques Rebière, Thomas Midwinter and his sister Sonia spanning 1860 – 1920.

Meeting by chance in Deauville aged 14, Thomas and Jacques swear allegiance to one another and the pursuit of “the way in which functions the mind of the human”. Despite their different backgrounds, training and viewpoints Thomas and Jacques become qualified ‘mad doctors’, form a partnership and open their first sanatorium with the indispensable help of Sonia.

The descriptions of a Victorian lunatic asylum - its patients, tunnels and ball; the African expedition – its footprints, mutiny, brains and all; Torrington House - upstairs and downstairs; Jacque’s childhood - silent stepmother, distant father and schizophrenic older brother moved, horrified, amused and saddened me by turn leaving me with vivid mental images.

Although the different schools of thought on psychiatry, psychoanalysis, psychotherapy and how the brain works are key to the development of the personal and professional relationship between Thomas and Jacques I found these passages too frequent, long and detailed so 4.5 stars for an otherwise outstanding work of fiction.

Descriptive, emotive, informative. Well worth reading. ( )

This novel proved to be quite a challenging read, hardly surprising given the subject of mental illness, not to mention the descriptions of its institutionalised treatment in the 19th century. I am not all that sure that a novel about the loves and lives of one family works all that well as a vehicle for an exploration of the development of different schools of psychiatric treatment, and some of the joins in the story jarred a bit. Bits seemed unlikely, such as poorly-educated residents of a barred institution in England becoming staff members in a sanitorium in Carinthia. When the narrative focuses on an individual, as with Olivier's switch to a first-person voice, then with Daniel, you know it is a prelude to the author killing them off. In the case of Daniel fighting in WWI, it seemed strange (given the theme of the novel) that he was killed rather than traumatised by shell-shock - perhaps the author was just too fond of the character and could not have him suffer.

My walks during lockdown have included a footpath through the grounds of the local mental hospital, huge gothic structures set up in 1843 in what was then country, as a radical change from the city centre poor house (work house) it replaced - fee-paying patients admitted to the grander of the two buildings, and probably treated there rather differently. The issue of the cost of psychiatric treatment is mentioned in "Human Traces", but not satisfactorily addressed. Once the two doctors had founded their sanitorium, we are told that the fee-paying residents subsidise others, but the narrative otherwise ignores them.

Other oddities of the novel are that the large institution in England is described in detail, as is Schloss Seeblick in Carinthia, which makes it striking that the replacement building up the mountain actually designed by the doctors is less clearly described. Both doctors take sabbaticals, and both seem somewhat implausible, indeed, I found it unlikely that Jacques Rebière would cross America to investigate cable cars, but ignore the opportunity to meet colleagues. I understand another novel set in the sanatorium at Schloss Seeblick in the 1930s ("Snow Country") has recently been published, which is puzzling if I am correct in thinking the sanatorium in the schloss, so lovingly evocated in "Human Traces", had closed decades earlier. As you see, although I do not find this a flawless book, it has given me a lot to think about, particularly when I walk through the grounds of the mental hospital. ( )

[This is a review I wrote in 2007]

**A very involved, complex and philosophical novel.**

This novel is a true literary work of art. It's deep and complex, and Faulks approaches the minefield of "the mind" in a clear and sensitive way. He also writes "Human Traces" in a style quite reminiscent of the literary greats of the nineteenth century, so you have to be careful not to try and rush it along as you're reading.

The characters are likeable and believable from the beginning. There's young Sonia who almost as soon as the novel begins, finds herself in a clearly unsuitable marriage, her bright brother Thomas, to whom she is devoted, and the ambitious French lad Jacques who comes from a quite different background. The boys meet by chance and, overcoming the language barrier, discover their mutual passion for science and the human mind. They are kindred souls, and their quest for understanding the mind is to take them along many, and sometimes different, paths - the Salpetriere in Paris, a county lunatic asylum in England, and across Europe, until they are considered quite renowned in their field of psychiatry.

Faulks's novel traverses one of the most illuminating periods in the history of psychiatry - the transitional phase from the late nineteenth century across into the twentieth and the First World War. Covering changes in care from restraint, to moral treatment, to psychiatry and neurological and drug treaments, the novel is a really good introduction to the history of psychiatry and one of its' major developmental phases.

In a way its' strength is also its' weakness. There are just a few places where I wished that Faulks had concentrated slightly less on the psychiatry and slightly more on the plot and characters. The depth of detail about the psychiatry can be bewildering and is probably not of interest to everyone. However, it's a small criticism and overall I can highly recommend the book. ( )

Only three out of five. A strange kind of novel, with Faulks' usual strong characterisations and settings intermixed with long and often tedious dissertations about the period's efforts to get to grips with mental illnesses. Many times I came close to giving up and at the end still wonder whether I should have invested my limited (therefore precious) reading time. ( )

Two young men one English the other French meet and set off together to find cures for mental disease in late XIX Century Europe. Along the way one spends some time in a grim Asylum in England the other attends lectures by Charcot as people begin to see how our characters are related to our brains. But the centre around which the novel turns is really Sonia, who tolerates her first loveless marriage hardly expecting anything better, then marries one of the brothers, and finds love with him and their doomed child Daniel.
There is lots of enjoyable circumstantial detail and perhaps a few blind alleys are explored. Including a rather unlikely escapade up a cable car.
Things don't end happily as the boys do not bring home a cure (which still eludes us).
The novel movingly displays the tragedy of mental illness, especially Schizophrenia.
Sonia however has given and received love, with several of the characters; is there anything more we can expect from life? ( )