 ome
novels, hefty and pumped full of fact, are like
a work-out at the gym, demanding a good level
of basic fitness. Human Traces (Hutchinson, £17.99),
the latest from Sebastian Faulks weighs in at
roughly a kilogram. You'd need to be really strong
to read it in the bath.
You'd also need to be interested
in 19th-century psychiatry, its subject. Its
main characters are two friends, an Englishman
and a Frenchman, who start out as medical students
before having long careers in Vienna, intertwined
personal lives, and endless arguments.
In the course of assembling
this book, Faulks has obviously read a great
deal, and he has shoehorned all his reading into
the over-packed suitcase of his narrative. Some
of it is lightly dramatised, but much of it still
raw, distressingly undigested, pages and pages
of lists and unleavened speeches, reading more
like research |
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Sebastian Faulks’s
latest is well researched, but
hard going, says lewis
jones |
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notes
than fiction.
At 614 pages, or about 250,000 words, Human
Traces demands stamina. There were times when
this reader felt like Sylvester Stallone, at his
lowest ebb in Rocky III, reeling on the
ropes. Still the relentless Faulks kept up his bombardment
of facts, steady, heavy, slow.
There's a joke about only reading
Playboy for the articles. Faulks's novels are a bit
like the articles in Playboy - massively researched,
earnest, worthy, too long, boring. But there are compensatory
diversions. Admirers of his erotic writing (the lyrical
rapture of which surely explains the sales of his Birdsong)
will enjoy the exploits of Fraulein Katharina von A.  |
