ECHOING & TWINNING Sebastian Faulks’ Thoughts on Time & Self
particularly since many of the characters appear in the earlier book, and those that were on the sidelines, are now in full focus. These arcs prompt questions, too, about how our younger selves develop in later life, how insights into past lives can spark understanding of our own. The books also in part share a setting. In Human Traces two cousins, Jacques Rebières and Thomas Midwinter, establish a sanatorium at Schloss Seeblick, a train ride from Vienna. Faulks confirmed that the institution is “entirely invented, though some of the buildings are based on houses I saw and visited.” In Snow Country, the sanatorium is now run by Martha, one of Thomas and Kitty’s twin daughters. Faulks has been said to write about women disarmingly well, with strong female leads in many of his earlier novels. This is true of Martha, whose deep understanding brings unison to the whole story. Another is Lena, whom we first meet as a child and then follow through a poignant coming-of-age. Her mother, Carina, a complex character, had worked at another asylum owned by Rebière and Winter, the Wilhelmskogel clinic. One of Egon Schiele’s portraits of a red-haired woman gave me the idea that Faulks might have drawn inspiration for her character there. But no. “The idea for Lena came from a book about nursing by Christie Watson in which she mentioned in passing a female patient who could only be happy when pregnant. This woman was also a heavy drinker. I wondered what it might be like to be a child of such a mother. It is a nice idea to think of Lena as depicted by Schiele with that staring, slightly desperate look. But I think she is by her nature less wanton than some of the women in Schiele’s paintings. She can be sensual, but only as part of her fuller nature.”
“Who were we?” is a question that poses the same conundrum for our present-day selves. Arguably, the process of answering is the quintessence of all history writing, but fiction authors can explore it more freely. Sebastian Faulks will be well known to many for his exceptional evocation of the First World War, known as the French trilogy: The Girl at the Lion d’Or (1989), Birdsong (1993) and Charlotte Gray (1999). The period is one that has always interested him, whether for the heights of bravery and abysses of suffering, or the plain incompetence of the rulers and politicians. Later wars form the background of much of his later work, too, but so do the enigmas of the human mind, our strangeness as a species, how prone we are to mental instability, our struggles to understand each other. This second strand occupies his acclaimed 2005 novel, Human Traces, the first of another trilogy focused on Vienna and the development of psychiatry and psychoanalysis. It is now followed by Snow Country (Hutchinson, September 2021). Faulks describes the relationship between his books as “cousins”, since some sections of Snow Country are set in 1910, before the First World War, but the main action takes place in 1933, with Europe precariously placed between two wars. Readers might find themselves enjoying the books in reverse order (as he quips, lives can’t be),
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FEATURES | Issue 98, November 2021
Summoned to Schloss Seeblick after her mother’s death, Lena “felt proprietary about the view” from the lake, and she tries to capture the sanatorium, a “new world” which for a time she called home, in paint. Faulks describes the building through many eyes, also Anton Heideck’s because, later, in 1933 he is sent to report on its mysterious history, at once luxurious retreat and place of healing, a place in turmoil and a trove of secrets. We first meet Anton in Vienna where, after university and through his early years as a journalist, he experiences his tender first love for the Frenchwoman Delphine. Faulks gives a masterclass in timeline management, by arching back and forwards throughout the book: the powerfully mysterious first chapter – a gripping scene of open surgery in a field hospital – only makes sense when we read later episodes, first with Delphine, then Lena and finally Martha. Snow Country is the English translation of a title previously used by Yasunari Kawabata, the Nobel Prize winner for literature in 1968: I was surprised to discover that Japan is indeed the world’s snowiest country. Faulks acknowledges this borrowing, as well as the inspiration of the book itself, in an afterword. However, when asked about any other connections, it proved a red herring: “There is no Japanese link that I am aware of, apart from my borrowing of the translated title of Kawabata’s book.” Instead, it is to South America that Anton heads, where he is sent by the newspaper for which he works to cover the last stages of the digging and flooding of the Panama Canal: filthy work in every respect. The year is 1913, and the Panama Canal is quite literally clogged up in politics, financing scandals, and horrendous mud that kills thousands of the workers.
