The doctor is out

There's an ingenious but rather pointless game that writers sometimes try. Write the longest possible short story without using the letter "e". Sebastian Faulks has tried something similar in Human Traces. Write a 600-page novel about the early history of psychiatry without mentioning Freud.

In one sense, it's an admirable ambition. Most of Freud's creative mythology is these days discounted by head-shrinkers, the rest is very much under a cloud, and only in the crudest folklore is he still regarded as the "father" of psychology.

But in another sense Faulks's game is perverse. Freudian analysis is clearly one of his major targets. In the novel's centrepiece (at exactly the halfway point) one character systematically demolishes another's Freudian views of a case by the application of more conventional medicine. The demolition is carried out with the author's full approval. In a bizarre later scene the "Viennese School" and the mythology of the Oedipus complex are discussed, but the name of Freud is scrupulously avoided as if it were a bad omen.

Outside this peculiarity, Human Traces is a very schematic novel. From the 1870s to the 1920s an Englishman and a Frenchman are friends and rivals in the quest to understand the human mind. The Frenchman reads Descartes. Therefore he's methodical and rational and seeks a neat unified theory. So he falls for Freudian psycho-analysis (which the novel calls by another name). The Englishman reads Shakespeare and Darwin. Therefore he's broad-minded and intuitive and sees the human mind in the context of the whole of evolution.

Guess which one this English author prefers?

One strand of the plot is the quest to understand schizophrenia, which is quite properly called by other names until about page 500. The term "schizophrenia" was then only beginning to be used, after all. Would that Faulks had been as sensitive to period in his ideas as he is in his terminology. Sometimes he draws on theories that simply weren't available at the time the novel is ostensibly set. Regrettably, this allows for the occasional lapse into the sort of easy retrospective irony that is a staple of less scrupulous historical fiction.

I wanted to like Human Traces more. It offers 600 pages of lucid, civilised, tasteful, well-researched prose. It is easy to read. Parts of it are even enlightening. But as a novel it is strictly an ink-horn book, born of the author's research. The characters are built to thesis and do not live.

HUMAN TRACES, by Sebastian Faulks (Hutchinson, $39.95).