Human Traces, by Sebastian Faulks, follows the lives of two men and those they love and lose along the way. It's another huge book, both in terms of length and also breadth of the topic - the nature of humanity! It starts in the 1870s with Jacques Rebiere, son of a peasant who lives in Brittany, and Thomas Midwinter, a Lincolnshire merchant's son. Jacques, who is taken under the wing of a local priest who sees the potential in his scientific mind, wants to find a cure for his beloved brother Olivier who is kept in the stable because he hears voices. Thomas, meanwhile, is unwillingly forced into medicine by his father. Both meet by chance in Deauville, forming an instant respect and admiration, and they determine that when they qualify as doctors, they will work together to further the study and cure of people like Olivier. They toil through many years and in trying circumstances, until they finally get their chance to create a new kind of clinic in Austria. By this time, Jacques is married to Thomas's sister, Sonia, and Thomas finally finds love with an ex-patient. However, the strong bond they once had begins to loosen as their thoughts and theories on how to treat the people in their care starts to take different paths. Tragedy is never far away, and, into the mix, the First World War also features. There aren't many laughs in this epic story of two men driven to the point of their own madness by their desire to understand and cure those whose mental health has deserted them. Both Jacques and Thomas are used as cyphers to show how the medical profession at the time dealt with such patients and the new ideas that were coming out about the nature of man, his origins and the reasons behind such conditions as schizophrenia and dementia. Whilst some of this is interesting, the immensity of the details given - which included full transcripts of lectures or papers the characters were delivering - left me a little cold. I didn't quite believe some of the actions of the characters either, including a strange affair by one of the men, which made me lose sympathy and interest in them - I think because it kind of came from nowhere and didn't really go anywhere. I can admire the level of research and the epic nature of the work, but sometimes the work felt more like a lesson than a story and my attention began to wander. There was also, for me, a bit of an imbalance in that so much time and space was given to the early years of both Thomas and Jacques, and the beginning of their time in their clinic, but then the ending felt raced through. It was almost as if the writer had said all they wanted to say and so decided to end the book without a satisfactory conclusion for my part. But then, life often isn't all wrapped up in a neat little bow .. but somehow, I'd like my fiction to do so ... unfair I suppose, but there it is! Hard going at times, but with passages full of feeling and heart, this was a curate's egg of a book for me, but I know others will feel very differently.
My STAR rating: FOUR.
Length: 615 print pages.
Price I paid: free, borrowed from my husband.
Formats available: print; unabridged audio download; ebook.
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