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Eminently Victorian. A novel about the early history of psychiatry impresses George Walden with its diligence, but leaves him wondering if uprightness, sobriety and industry can ever produce more than decent fiction
Published 05 September 2005
Human Traces
Sebastian Faulks Hutchinson, 615pp, £17.99
ISBN 0091794552
Some friends of mine once told me how appalled they had been when their daughter had an accident and when, on seeing her, the doctor they had summoned cried. They did not want his damp-eyed commiseration; they wanted cool, efficient treatment. In the same way, you sometimes wonder whether the cross-party policy of "care in the community" is more a means of making us feel good about our sensibilities towards the mentally afflicted than a practical commitment to their welfare.
All this came to mind when the curtain of this novel went up on a pair of 19th-century psychiatrists (or "alienists", in that richly suggestive word) and their patients - gibbering and befouled men and women, cared for in primitive institutions, whose prospects and conditions Faulks's medical heroes are doing their best to improve. For a moment you fear the worst: is this yet another tale about how shockingly unfeeling the Victorians were and (by implication) how humane and enlightened we are - fiction writers especially - today? A few pages in, and your worries subside. Whatever motivated Faulks to write this highly factual account of 19th-century psychiatry it was not, thank God, a self-admiring conscience.
It is a rule of thumb of the honesty of a historical novel that the less superior it leaves us feeling, the more truthful it is likely to be. Faulks has no truck with unhistorical emotional correctness. By modern lights his heroine, Sonia, ought to be a Victorian woman struggling bravely to assert herself in a crushingly patriarchal world, but she is not: she is a dutiful, though intelligent, young woman inclined to submit without protest, as so many in her time did, to home-making and the family. His mind doctors, as unsentimental as their era, spend little time empathising with their charges. Instead, they speak of them as "madmen", a term offensive to our porcelain ears, because in their pragmatic, Victorian way they were keener on discovering cures than in indulging their sympathies for the afflicted. Nor is Faulks interested in imposing Foucauldian-type constructs on the insane, of the kind that the late Roy Porter dismissed in Madmen, his work on the history of psychiatry.
So, no "expose", and little retrospective anger; in fact nothing much in the way of authorial indignation at all. Realism, sobriety and decency are Faulks's guiding spirits, above all decency, a quality much in evidence in previous works. Everything in Faulks's universe falls comfortingly into its allotted role. Thomas and his sister Sonia, models of sibling love, are products of a decent, upper-middle-class background, and grow up in the perfectly named and charmingly run-down family home, Torrington, towards which they harbour a very proper affection in later years. Similarly with national types. Thomas becomes a psychiatrist and befriends Jacques, a French colleague with whom he works in Austria. And naturally, it is the French and the Germans who, carried away by their subject and their egos, are inclined to allow conceptual conceits (notably those of the real-life French professor Jean-Martin Charcot about hysteria) to get in the way of empirical knowledge. One of the novel's didactic aspects lies in its suggestion of why, for temperamental reasons, the English have always excelled at science.
Nor are we surprised to find that it is Jacques, rather than the stalwart Thomas, who has the affair with a suitably wild Slavonic lady, or that it is Jacques's English wife Sonia who, decently, forgives him. An Anglo-Saxon reticence characterises the sex scenes, as decently few as they are fittingly awkward. "I was thinking of you. Of a particular part of you." "And would you like to see it? Not just imagine it?" "Yes. Lift up your skirt . . ." "Does it feel as you imagined?" The Victorian melodramatic moments, of which there are a fair number, also seem somehow right.
That Faulks's interest lies more in the history of psychiatric medicine than in rounding out characters who have clearly been designed to fit the subject, rather than the other way round, is more evidence of his novel's worthiness. "And what generous intentions it bespeaks towards the unfortunate!" exclaims the constructor of an asylum. The same could be said about the constructor of Human Traces - as it could be said about Birdsong, Faulks's highly successful tale of the First World War.
Fittingly, too, the novel betrays evidence of Victorian diligence; the research for it was clearly on an industrial scale, to the point where the acknowledgments resemble the sources of an article in the Lancet. Sometimes it reads like populist medical history, a genre by no means to be despised in an era when - as the champions of Harry Potter are forever telling us - we should be grateful that anyone is reading anything at all. And given that the modern novel is a completely free form, there is no reason why it should not switch tack to include medical lectures some 15 pages long, or prolonged descriptions of procedures. At such moments technical terms can get in the way of the author's duty of care to his readers: "while the dura was held back with silver clips inserted by an assistant, Fischer exclaimed at the health and beauty of the lower meninges - the arachnoid and the pia mater". One wonders whether the author has found a use for these words mainly because they are exotic and because, worthily, he has gone to the trouble of mugging them up. I once had to mug up 3,000 Chinese characters, God help me, but that would be no excuse for writing this review in Mandarin.
Balzacian might be one description of Faulks's hyper-realist approach (Balzac took a lively interest in medicine, notably phrenology), were it not that his style has little else in common with the Frenchman's comedie humaine. In Faulks, the progress of experimental psychology has it over imaginative fiction, and unlike with Balzac's sometimes hectic prose, everything here is well under control. Even touches of satire are appropriately mild. When Dr Wilhelm Fleiss, "an ear, nose and throat specialist with psychological ambitions", develops a theory about the relationship between the nose and the female sexual organs to an audience of distinguished scientists, he is listened to with grave respect: "No one wished to risk having laughed at the new Galileo." Think what a better place the world would have been if someone had laughed at the most outre aspects of Freud rather sooner than they did.
One of the problems with deeply researched novels on tech-nical themes is that they invite specialist attention. As shown by the devastating commentary by Ben Shephard on Pat Barker's Booker-winning The Ghost Road about trauma in the First World War (Shephard is the authority), expert examination can terminally dent a book's credibility. In that regard Faulks has nothing to fear from this critic; all I can say is that I suspect he would fare better in specialist hands than the ideologically finger-wagging Barker. Faulks's decency never slips into sanctimony, and for that we should be grateful. The contrast between the self-satisfied serenity of late 19th-century Britain and the bedlam in which its most neglected and degraded people lived is suggested, as is the analogy between their madness and the insanity of the First World War, but these points are implicit rather than tiresomely overstated.
For all the shortcomings of his novel, it is hard to withhold admiration for the task Faulks has set himself, and for the work he has done. The trouble is that he ends up as a victim of his subject, and of the era in which it is largely set. His novel, of Victorian length, has the Victorian virtues of a strong narrative, while being simultaneously instructive and in the best sense improving. As fiction, it suffers from the defects of these virtues. The problem is one not unfamiliar in English fiction as a whole: namely whether uprightness, sobriety, industry and a high competence can ever add up to anything more than a decent novel.
George Walden's most recent book is Who's a Dandy? (Gibson Square)
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