Discover Human Traces Fabricated By Sebastian Faulks File Readable Copy
difficult book to rate and review, Parts of it were sublime the rest tedious and didactic, If it had beenpages shorter it would have been outstanding, As it stands, the beginning full of hope and the end full of despair were worth the read, I cried twice in this book: at the beauty of the opening pages and the pathos of the closing pages, It's a pity that the middle was such heavy going,
Obviously authors who've already made their name are allowed to ignore basic writing rules such as "show, don't tell", That's fine when it works but in this book, Faulks appears to take the easy way out and at times his "telling" ran intoconsecutive pages with the occasional token "Thomas stood up" or "Thomas said" to break the monotony.
What was his editor thinking in letting these sections stand!!
In addition, there were a few plot hooks that didn't lead anywhere, For example, the mysterious archivist in the lunatic asylum, The end hook of chapter VII was the dramatic announcement "My name, too, you see, is Midwinter", I was left wondering throughout the remainingpages what the dramatic connection was to Dr Thomas Midwinter, But as this was neither concluded nor developed, I was frustrated, So why the emphasis
Sometimes pretentious in languageat other times lecturing in tone, this book was still inhabited by marvellous characterisations throughout, Ultimately, it was a brave attempt at fictionalising a philosophy on what it is to be human that didn't quite work, The conclusion that the book brings one to is that to be human is to despair hope is not an option because in the greater scheme of the universe to be human is to be insignificant.
I prefer books that offer a less nihilistic view of our human experience,
I picked up
thisnovel as it was recommended by my friend and esteemed work colleague Julie, In short: I loved it,
I see from both Goodreads and newspaper reviews that this novel is not universally liked but it was right up my street, It follows the lives of two doctors, from their childhoods through their careers as specialists in psychiatry to their old age, They set up a clinic together despite developing contrasting theories as to the causes of and treatments for mental illness, and their intellectual differences both bind them together and drive them apart.
This novel was perfect for me because Faulks skilfully wove together fictional biography with medicine, psychiatry, travel, the thrill of early scientific discovery, moral complexity, interpersonal relationships, love and philosophy all things I really enjoy reading about.
The sometime lengthy exposition of early psychiatric theory in the book is often singled out as a point for criticism, but I found it fascinating.
I was completely absorbed into the world Faulks created,
The edition I read ran topages but felt far shorter, This is a book which I will remember for a long time,
Shakespeare drew a new map of the human mind as clearly as Newton mapped the heavens, Why is one considered science and the other fit only to be mocked with jokes about pretty girls and Drury Lane
It turns out that a fiction writer is much better at explaining science to me than a renowned psychiatrist.
I read earlier this year an autobiography of Irving Yalom, who bored me to death with irrelevant details about his private life and failed to provide a clear image of the basis of his beliefs.
Well, except for one detail that has relevance to the present novel: Mr Yalom has become convinced early in his celebrated career that writers and philosophers have as much to say about the way the human mind works as scientists and psychotherapists.
I knew already that Sebastian Faulks is a great storyteller, What I didnt really expect was that he would help me map the early developments in the study of the human brain with such clarity, with such passion and with such compassion.
“You see, I have this idea that we must somehow try to understand the meeting point between thought and flesh, That is what the next great aim and discovery of medical science will be, Are you with me”
Starting in the late Victorian Era, with two children driven by curiosity to understand the world surrounding them, the progress of science is overlaid by the personal lives of these two boys, following their struggles to understand and treat madness until the time of their retirement more than five decades later.
The novel should have been heavy with the research material included in the text, but I burned through the pages with unexpected swiftness, captivated both by the slow, tentative and fraught with errors progress in the science and by the personal, emotional journey through life of the two doctors with their families and friends.
I can understand how many readers might find the novel overlong and even difficult when the usual plot is replaced by very long dissertations about the workings of the brain.
My own fascination with the subject and my admiration for the way mr, Faulks likes to tell a story prompt me to add this book among my personal favourites,
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He is just like me, but completely different at the same time, He has had all the same thoughts yet they have come from a different life, a different world, Its like two men bumping into each other in the jungle when one started in Iceland and one in China and finding they are reading the same book.
Before becoming a book about science, the novel is a story about friendship, and about love and about a life well lived.
Thomas Midwinter is born in England, in a relatively wealthy family who has a countryside manor and a moderately successful business, An adventurous child with a passion for poetry, Thomas is advised by an older sister named Sonia, to seek a career in medicine,
Jacques Rebiere grows up in a poor region of Bretagne, with an abusive and indifferent father and without a mother, who dies giving birth to him.
Thomas has an older brother named Olivier who manifests signs of schizophrenia as a teenager and lives chained to a wall in a barn, With some help from the local priest and driven by a desire to help his brother, Jacques begins to study biology and medicine,
Years later, when both Thomas and Jacques are students of medicine, they meet in Deauville on a holiday with Sonia, They recognize each other as kindred souls, and make a vow by the ocean, under the, to dedicate their lives to understanding how the brain works.
Over the years, their journey will take them from an insane asylum in England, to the conference halls of the Salpetriere in Paris and finally to a private clinic in Austria, with detours into California, Germany, Central Africa and many other places of study.
Families and children, professional successes and defeats, world wars and economic strife will only be the background against which their life mission unfolds,
Thomas had a moment of despair, as he always had when seeing madness en masse, a sense of trying to empty the sea with a bucket.
The period of study chosen by the author is not accidental, It starts with early efforts to help those afflicted by mental illness by gathering them together from families and into asylums where they can be provided with help and studied scientifically.
Among the many names and studies mentioned here is one Samuel Tuke, a pioneer of care that replaced punishment with kindness and understanding for the less fortunate among us.
It was curious, he had to admit, that the first medicine was not a herbal preparation or a surgical procedure, but simple kindness.
The next step is to classify and describe the nature of the illness, and in this area a prominent place is given to Jean Martin Charcot, whose presentations in Paris are attended by both Thomas and Jacques.
His theories about the physical nature of mental illness the flesh will be later challenged and put in perspective by later students,
The move to Austria and the focus on what will become known as psychotherapy is a logical step for the two young doctors as they continue to search for the elusive link between the mind and the flesh.
Nihil humanum sibi puto alienum esse
There is little difference between a doctor and an artist, Both try to understand what it means to be human, Both are prone to passions and insecurities, to valuable insights and to following wrong paths, Thomas and Jacques work together, but follow different paths and slightly different methods in their studies: Thomas the poet seems more interested in the way genetics play a role in causing the brain cells to misfire, while Jacques becomes focused on the study of dreams and childhood trauma.
Thomas, who loves Shakespeare and is not adverse to Bible interpretations, can identify clues in old myths and clerical texts, even in fossil footprints from millions of years ago.
Jacques gets carried away by the promises of a universal key to unlock the human mind provided by the new guru of the salons in Vienna.
Jacques and he had not been able to cure madness, so they had fabricated something that they could cure,
The two main directions of study are made clear with the help of two actual cases:
For Thomas the schizophrenia of Olivier, still unabated after three decades of illness
For Jacques the treatment of a young woman who presents symptoms of childhood trauma manifesting as physical illness.
I am grossly simplifying the journey here, bypassing many intermediary stages and numerous secondary characters that are important either in the medical studies and in the personal lives of the doctors.
But it helps me put my thoughts about the novel in order, even if it does a disservice to the five years of work the author put into this novel.
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First, the Thomas approach:
“One day, this instability may regulate itself through successful transmutation, Until then, I do not see men like Olivier as being degenerate or retarded I see them rather as at the forefront, in the vanguard of what it means to be human.
”
“But they suffer,” said Franz,
“My god, they suffer, I think they suffer for all of us, It is almost as though they bear the burden of our sins, It is scarcely too much to say that they pay the price for the rest of us to be human, ”
The first step is to separate the amorphous mass of madness into categories, Olivers illness was named hebephrenia in the early days, before being lumped together with general schizophrenia, Thomas had few tools available for his studies in those early days, relying mostly on postmortem microscope studies of brain tissue and on extensive reading into the contemporary papers.
His conclusions are speculative at best and with few practical applications, but I found the way he connects religion and literature to the problem to be captivating.
“If we are right about the hereditary nature of schizophrenia, then perhaps we can breed it out of the population, as we breed Jersey cows, tea roses or greyhounds.
On the other hand, if it is as closely linked as we believe to the combination of genes that give us our human capacities, it can never be eradicated.
You would have to annihilate the whole of humanity, ”
Of even greater interest is the way Thomas can express the limitations of the scientific method in a way that proves this to be its greatest asset:
“So Mr.
Darwin was right about one thing and wrong about another, ”
“Yes. That is the nature of science, ”
“And does that apply to you as well, my love That you will not get everything right”
“Yes, The twostepforwardonestepback law of scientific discovery will take care of that, And the limits of the human mind, ”
and the way he speaks respectfully of religion without renouncing his basic humanism:
“Will you be able to do all this without recourse to God Is He not more likely to provide the answers than hereditary processes we cannot understand and instruments that have not been invented”
“That has traditionally been His role the guardian of mysteries.
But He is a costive and niggardly keeper, He does not give up any secrets, Humans unriddle them all for themselves, When we have answered the last question, we will have no more need to dignify our ignorance with the name of God, ”
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Jacques tries to embrace psychoanalysis as an early adopter and ends up underlining the limitations of the method right from its inception:
Small truths, homely facts, when they are applied to the world as representative of all the world, cease to be facts and become superstitions.
Thus has this little thought become elevated, made sacrosanct and set to work as a dogma in a school of medicine, . .
I find it extremely relevant that the name Freud is not mentioned a single time in the novel, while that of his contemporary Wilhelm Fliess is given a direct role in the plot.
My own reservations about Freud are in this way amply confirmed by mr, Faulks. I will leave the actual details of the harm that can be done by a too strict adherence to a fanciful theory that tries to extrapolate from a few individual cases to the whole range of human mental processes to those readers who are patient enough to follow the arguments in the novel.
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What else can I add here Sebastian Faulks has a keen sense for the historical background that animates his fictional characters and anchors them in well known events like the First World War, the early days of the California boom, a mountaintop sanatory in Carinthia or a memorable journey to the Great Rift Valley.
He also has a balanced approach to the role the women played in the lives of these doctors driven by science, Sofia Midwinter in particular has as strong, as important a presence in the economy of the novel as Thomas or Jacques, From a constricted, much abused Victorian maiden who is refused an education and forced to marry a man not of her own choosing, she manages to carve for herself a full and interesting life beside the two most important men in her life.
I have kept the last quote as a way to underline that even a life that ends in defeat is worth living, if you learn to look upon its hard earned moments of grace.
I must pull in sail and lower my sights from the horizon, I am quite content to do so because I have been so fortunate in my life,
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