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Book 11: "Human Traces" by Sebastian Faulks
Tuesday, March 9th, 2010 12:13If Homo sapiens were to mutate again and shake the kaleidoscope of particles that makes him, it is possible that he could retain his modern mind by losing his madness. Possible. But the truth is, we have always, from the moment of our origination, been a profoundly flawed species - mad in the basic particles of our being, radically insane - and the building of the great asylums only served to show us the magnitude of our madness, as the rural lunatics were gathered up and put beneath one roof with their urban cousins for the first time. Psychosis, ladies and gentlemen, is the price we pay for being human.
This was an interesting novel, and could have been more so, but there was so much detailed information about developments in the understanding of mental illness in the late 19th and early 20th century, that it tended to drag at times. If I wanted that much information, I would read a non-fiction book on the subject. When Jacques and Thomas gave public speeches outlining their theories, I really didn't need to read the whole texts of the speeches, pages and pages of i, but the worst example of this info-dump came when Thomas was in Africa. He decided to remove the brain from a dead Masai guide, not because he thought the brain would be in any way different from that of a European, but merely in order to pontificate on his theories about the link between evolution, consciousness and madness in tedious detail to the big game hunter he was travelling with, who eventually said he didn't want to hold the brain any longer and went off to bed, leaving Thomas talking to himself.
Apart from that, the main problem was that the main characters weren't particularly likeable or engaging, and never really drew me into their story, so I didn't really care what became of the two main couples. The thirty pages following Daniel's time as a soldier in Flanders and Italy during WWI were moving but didn't really seem to fit in with the rest of the book, and when the focus returned to his parents, uncle and aunt for the last few pages of the book, it only emphasised how little I had engaged with them.
This was an interesting novel, and could have been more so, but there was so much detailed information about developments in the understanding of mental illness in the late 19th and early 20th century, that it tended to drag at times. If I wanted that much information, I would read a non-fiction book on the subject. When Jacques and Thomas gave public speeches outlining their theories, I really didn't need to read the whole texts of the speeches, pages and pages of i, but the worst example of this info-dump came when Thomas was in Africa. He decided to remove the brain from a dead Masai guide, not because he thought the brain would be in any way different from that of a European, but merely in order to pontificate on his theories about the link between evolution, consciousness and madness in tedious detail to the big game hunter he was travelling with, who eventually said he didn't want to hold the brain any longer and went off to bed, leaving Thomas talking to himself.
Apart from that, the main problem was that the main characters weren't particularly likeable or engaging, and never really drew me into their story, so I didn't really care what became of the two main couples. The thirty pages following Daniel's time as a soldier in Flanders and Italy during WWI were moving but didn't really seem to fit in with the rest of the book, and when the focus returned to his parents, uncle and aunt for the last few pages of the book, it only emphasised how little I had engaged with them.
