required reading

I've recently finished two big novels, and I'd like to post on both of them. In my lunch hour, though, I only have time for one of them at a time!

The first big read was Sebastian Faulks' Human Traces, a whopping 600+ page novel, the story of a Frenchman and an Englishman who conspire together to "cure mental illness", amidst the birth of psychiatry and the neurological sciences. My notes on this have been hanging around for a while; here's an attempt to construct something from them, weeks old though they are.

The scope of the novel is grand and ambitious and Faulks' research is a painstaking effort to achieve depth and accuracy- from the lectures of Charcot, famous 19th century neurologist Salpêtrière in Paris, to medical procedures and social details. The research is all too evident, however, and perpetually reminds the reader that she is reading a novel. Some elements were too knowing to give pleasure, such as a character's prediction that the word 'gene' would never catch on, or repeated comments that the term 'evolution' wasn't popularized by Darwin. Other details of style jarred, such as a sentence that began 'To put the matter another way, he thought...' I have doubts that anyone ever thinks in constructions such as 'to put it another way'. What lies underneath this little niggling element is the author's desire to show a debate, to create a symposium in which the various strands of neurological and psychological research of the Victorian era could be aired. Hence his two heroes, Jacques and Thomas, who diverge to follow the schools of psychoanalysis and neurology respectively. Hence the unlikely excursions of the main characters to California and Africa, respectively.

Other aspects of the storytelling left me similarly cold, and they lay mostly in the characterization: I did not buy the instant soulmate friendship between Jacques and Thomas, except as a contrivance designed to allow Faulks to show these two characters' lives in counterpoint from early in the novel; I did not understand the female characters or their attraction to their husbands, and their characterization was depressingly thin.

The medical and historical detail of the novel was fascinating, however, and the description, which seemed overdone at first, was richly satisfying. Faulks' subject is mental illness and medicine, but his theme is human ambition, and the nature of humanity, and this was well-executed.Jacques and Thomas' grand aim is to solve mental illness, to find a cure for the schizophrenia that plagues Jacques' brother. Their aim remains unfulfilled, as the reader knows it will from the start. The characters fail to cure their patients, and they struggle to convey their theories to the academic world.

Sonia, Thomas' sister, and Jacques' wife, seems to have the sole aim and ambition in life of motherhood. Is her life less worthwhile because she has not devoted herself to the big questions that her husband and brother have? Sonia's ambition seems to be smaller, yet it is achieved, and the novel does after all end with her. But Faulks has missed a trick here - his slim characterization of this woman and his failure to convince in his depiction of any of his female characters in this novel rob him of an opportunity to explore the differences between Sonia and her brother and husband.

And Faulks continues on the theme of ambition and vocation. Another character in the novel, a painter named Valade, speaks of his own ability to conceptualize perfectly what he wishes to paint but knows that as soon as the brush touches the canvas he has begun to fail. The unsatisfactory end to Jacques and Thomas career is perhaps faintly depressing to a reader, but is a good portrayal of the common feeling of being outstripped by our own ambitions and desires. Part of what being human is, Faulks says, is to have desires to know things beyond our comprehension, to have ambition, and yet to sometimes simply come up thumping our heads against a wall.