Resumo de Human Traces - Sebastian Faulks

?Human Traces explores the question of what kind of beings men and women really are.? So the publishers would have us believe. It?s an ambitious statement and suitably vague to be applicable to any kind of half-decent human drama, but Human Traces falls short of this mark. It is certainly ambitious in chronological scope, tracing the story of three interlinking lives from childhood to old-age, tackling their hopes, fears, joys, tragedies, with sufficient skill to be emotionally involving, but not gripping.

The story begins with Jacques Rebiere, a sixteen-year-old Breton lad who has ambitions of curing his demented brother, Olivier. A local priest, Abbe Henri, encourages him in his scientific pursuits and assists in his movement through various educational establishments until he becomes a qualified Doctor. In the meantime his brother is locked away in an asylum. Across the English Channel, Thomas Midwinter, a boy of the same age, also decides to pursue a career in medicine, this being the only conceivable (parentally approved) outlet for his philanthropic interests. His own elder sibling, Sonia, is married off to one Richard Prendergast, a young entrepreneur with a notion to take up sugar trading in London. The Rebiere and Midwinter families are destined to meet, and it is perhaps one of the faults of the novel that such a meeting seems contrived. When Thomas travels to France with his sister and brother-in-law he sees Jacques at a lodging house, they spend the night and following morning talking of their joint passion for the study of the mind, and by the time they part they vow to link their lives professionally: to set up a sanatorium designed to cure the insane and advance human understanding of consciousness. Before this happens, however, they both need to complete their medical training. Sonia?s marriage crumbles during this time; her husband is a gambler who loses most of their money and assets, and he blames her for failing to bear him children; as a result her father agrees to a divorce and she returns to the family home at Torrington. Thomas invites Jacques to stay with his family, inevitably he falls in love with Sonia, and they marry. If this seems sudden in summary it is just so in the novel, where such a contrivance of plot detracts from the notion of Faulk?s characters being anything other than fictive tools.

Thomas, Sonia, and Jacques set up their first sanatorium in Carinthia, a province of Austria-Hungary, where they rent an abandoned Abbey and rename it Schloss Seeblick (Lake View Castle). All goes well until Jacques delivers a lecture on dream interpretation and the suggestive power of the mind, which is largely discredited. A rift begins to develop between Jacques and Thomas; they take different theoretical approaches to the nature and remedy of mental illnesses, which is brought to a crisis during the treatment of a woman called Katherina. Katherina, or Kitty as she is later known, complains of chest problems and abdominal pains which she thinks could be linked to the death of her father. Jacques diagnoses her case as being one of hysteria, purely psychosomatic, and it is only after Thomas reads over his notes that he spots the more simple causes of her illness: ovarian cysts and rheumatic fever. He rushes her to hospital for a life-saving operation. This is a mistake which embarrasses Jacques and worries Thomas, and the situation is not helped by the fact that Thomas falls in love with Kitty. After some time they are married, she moves into the Schloss with Jacques, Sonia and Thomas, but she reassures Jacques that she bears no hard feelings over her misdiagnosis. Sonia gives birth to a child: Daniel, and Kitty, later, to twins: Charlotte and Martha.

After a few years they move to a new site in the mountains: Wilhelmskogel, and a cable cart system is designed to transport patients across the steep incline. Before the opening of the new sanatorium, Olivier Rebiere, undergoing treatment with as Thomas?s patient, kills himself by leaping from the mountain top. From this moment Jacques becomes disillusioned with life and he begins a lustful affair with a Russian woman called Roya. Without his knowing Sonia learns of this, but she suffers silently; as the First World War develops across Europe she performs an act of remarkable selflessness in order to keep her husband happy. Seeing him so depressed when Roya leaves Carinthia, she forges a note from her love rival to her faithless husband, telling him of her eternal love, ?beyond time and place'.

Thomas travels to Africa to investigate footprints of early man in volcanic ash. Upon his return he too delivers a lecture which both outlines his distance from Jacques and attacks his friend?s academic standpoint. He claims that mental illness is not the creation of mental trauma, not self-serving, rather is a product of evolutionary consciousness. He suggests that as man evolved he was given self-awareness but also the capacity to hear voices - dementia. After this lecture Thomas and Jacques do not speak for many years.

At the end of the novel Daniel Rebiere goes to war and dies in the Austrian mountains at the age of 16. Thomas develops Alzheimer?s, and Sonia travels to the birthplace of her husband, where she sees the ghost of Jacques? mother. Although neat in its construction, Human Traces lacks something in the way of subtlety; of character and interaction.

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