(Hutchinson, £17.99)
When a well-known author brings out a new novel, you expect the critic reviewing it to have read some, or most, or—ideally—all of the author's previous work. This is a basic courtesy of reviewing culture, and one that it would seem perverse to question. Yet assessing a novel in terms of the reputation and oeuvre of the author is not sufficient. Most reviewers, for example, have been judging Sebastian Faulks's new novel on the grounds of whether it works as the type of emotionally involving narrative they expect Faulks to be good at, rather than assessing a work of fiction about the early days of psychiatry.
Considered purely for its handling of its subject—and disregarding Faulks's previous novels—Human Traces is vastly ambitious. It reassembles a production line of thought from the technical hitch of Cartesian dualism—where, precisely, does the mind join the brain?—to the practical problem of how to treat people whose mental apparatus has collapsed. It reimagines the historical circumstances in which, towards the end of the 19th century, modern medicine began to make advances with the mind-body problem in the laboratory where it most matters: in the brains of the mad. And in so doing, it reframes in psychiatric terms the great nature vs nurture dilemma of the modern era: to what extent are humans engineered by events and society, and to what extent by forces of evolution and biology?
This is all neatly and powerfully stencilled in by the novel's two central characters: a Frenchman who represents the early days of psychodynamic approaches to mental illness (talking cures), and an Englishman who ends up convinced that most insanity is caused by neurological or genetic dysfunction. Faulks also gives this framework a nice inversion. It is Jacques Rebière, the Frenchman, who starts out as a "hard" scientist but grows to believe that the secrets of madness lie in memory and culture, while it is Thomas Midwinter, the Englishman, who begins as a student of culture but ends up a Darwinist of brain science. From their intersecting standpoints, these two friends are both driven by an urge to seek out the explanation and cure for the illness besetting Jacques's brother—which, by the end of the story, has received its modern diagnosis: schizophrenia. Inevitably, they fail in their quest, but their lives nevertheless map out the great landmarks of the modern struggle to explain consciousness.
Not once does the word "Freud" appear in the book, and the later ascendancy of psychoanalysis is hinted at only by reference to the developing theories of the "Viennese School." Rather, the reader is invited to think back and reconsider an entire field of thought without being distracted by the retrospectively overbearing presence of a single, divisive figure. In other words, Faulks is attempting to use the historical novel for its highest purpose: to rethink contemporary assumptions through an imaginative return to dramas of the past. As a result, he produces a kind of fictionalised primer into the formative principles of psychiatry, neuroscience, psychoanalysis, evolutionary psychology and genetics.
But Faulks also develops a grand, central idea of his own. Or, rather, he borrows a grand idea, which he then makes his own by transforming it into an animating principle of his fictional world. This idea has barely troubled the surface of reviews of Human Traces, and nowhere has the source of it been discussed or identified (even though Faulks himself does so, fulsomely, in his acknowledgements). The big idea belongs to the controversial American psychologist Julian Jaynes. In The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, published in 1976, Jaynes concocted the notion that, as language evolved, humans in the early stages of consciousness would hear voices—a neurological response to the need for individuals to function at a distance from the group, receiving internal "instructions" through a primitive, voice-hearing consciousness, rather than by direct communication with one another. This faculty gradually disappeared as human society developed but, crucially, it continued to resurface in schizophrenics—people who were unable to suppress, as it were, their ancestral, evolutionary voices. Despite being highly speculative, and often considered a "cult" theory, Jaynes's theory nevertheless has aspects that some neuroscientists still find helpful.
Faulks, however, finds the idea helpful because it does something for him as a novelist. It gives heightened expression to the belief outlined in the book that schizophrenia contains a kind of code for the development of the human mind (as a by-product of consciousness, it is the defining human illness); and it also gives him a metaphor for the motivations of literature. Ever since those voices disappeared, he suggests, man has been plagued by a sorrow for their absence. "In the Iliad," Thomas Midwinter says, "the characters take instruction from the voices of the gods. Achilles is not a conscious man. He is a human at an intermediate stage." What took place subsequently, as most humans ceased to hear their internal voices, is the drama that we witness in the Old Testament. "It is the story of a people crying in the wilderness—and what they are crying for is their lost gods." Faulks may, at this point, have left behind the verifiable scientific aspects of the rest of his book, but he has at the very least found a metaphor that draws it all together: the biology of madness, the human-ness of madness, the sorrow of madness.
The general response among critics to Faulks's cornucopia of learning and creative speculation could be summed up in the words of one review: "too many ideas." Or, to put it in Jane Stevenson's rather more subtle phrase in the Observer: "Faulks's desire to present complex ideas and arguments sometimes stretches the fictional form to, if not beyond, its limits." What she and others have pointed to is the feeling that Jacques Rebière and Thomas Midwinter are less fully-fleshed characters than ciphers for the twin poles of Faulks's Socratic argument.
Yet the ideas Faulks develops move with impassioned force across a huge canvas. Even if he has not quite achieved that ultimate, Dostoevskian fusion of character and idea, the book is a significant achievement. Certainly, it is not for readers with no interest in theories of the mind. But it would be odd to think, as Stevenson suggests, that there is something about the novel as a form which makes it incompatible with such a complex assembly of ideas.
A more interesting way of looking at this may be that Faulks is a very English writer. (This is evident in the arcing lucidity of his narrative—pleasingly symmetrical yet assured that behind the artifice lies a social reality.) And there is something about the "novel of ideas" which still twitches unresolved in the English literary unconscious. Narrative and ideas seem to operate within separate spheres. Faulks's book deals with theory by discussing it explicitly in dialogue, or by presenting it in the form of lectures—one by Rebière and a counterblast by Midwinter, which set out their different visions. This represents a kind of Anglo-Saxon pragmatism: narrative establishes the world, and then characters set out to explain it. And it may shed some light on why such a monumental work should have received such a lukewarm critical response. Most reviewers wanted more of the storytelling and less of the thinking. Which, in one sense, is fair enough—if the two do indeed fail to integrate. Yet this seems to me to be a shortcoming in the reviews rather than the book. Faulks brings all his characters to ripeness through their ideas. Jacques, the proto-therapist, has to exculpate the loss of his mother through sex. Thomas the biological determinist loses his mind to Alzheimer's disease. Faulks's characters writhe and struggle with the ideas they represent, and are movingly doomed to bear them out.
Furthermore, there is a lovely irony about the novelistic style in which Faulks develops notions about the evolution of consciousness. Ultimately, he champions the neo-Darwinian view of the human mind: driven by forces beyond culture and beyond history. And yet that worldview is delivered to the reader in a manner that feels reassuringly English and culturally determined.
