Human Traces was published by Hutchinson in 2005. It is Faulks’s longest novel (over 600 pages) and his most intellectually demanding — a work that takes the history of psychiatry from Charcot through Kraepelin to the trenches of World War I and uses it to ask a question of startling ambition: what if madness is not a disease but a feature? What if the same cognitive architecture that allows humans to have language, self-consciousness, and imagination also, inevitably, produces schizophrenia?
Jacques Rebière and Thomas Midwinter meet as young men in the 1870s — Jacques a French provincial doctor’s son, Thomas an English public-school boy — and become lifelong friends and collaborators, united by their fascination with the mad. They train in the great asylums of the era (under Charcot at the Salpêtrière, in the English county asylums), then establish their own clinic in the Austrian Alps.
Their intellectual disagreement drives the novel: Jacques believes (following Kraepelin) that mental illness is organic — brain disease, neurological degeneration, ultimately addressable through physical medicine. Thomas believes (anticipating Julian Jaynes and modern evolutionary psychiatry) that madness is the shadow side of consciousness itself — that the capacity for language and self-awareness, which evolved recently and rapidly, is inherently unstable, and that auditory hallucinations (hearing voices) may be the atavistic remnants of an earlier form of cognition.
The novel’s scope encompasses the entire development of modern psychiatry — from the chains and asylums of the early nineteenth century through hypnotism, psychoanalysis, and early neuroscience — while maintaining the emotional force of a friendship tested across decades by intellectual disagreement, professional rivalry, and the personal tragedies that the war inflicts on both families.
Collecting Human Traces
First edition (Hutchinson, London, 2005): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $15–$40
- Signed first edition: $40–$100
- Without jacket: $5–$12
Faulks’s most ambitious novel and the one he has said he is proudest of. Less commercially successful than Birdsong but increasingly valued by readers interested in the history of ideas.