Sebastian Faulks - Snow Country

Sebastian Faulks, Snow Country (Hutchinson-Heinemann)

The second part of Sebastian Faulks's 'Vienna' trilogy takes its title from a novel by Kawabata. I originally abandoned the first part, Human Traces, and gave the hardback away only to buy it again in paperback to make my Faulks collection complete minus the pastiches he's done, read it again and liked it much better. I read the wrong Kawabata the other week to be able to shed light on any parallels involved but now, no longer so concerned about any attempt at completism, Snow Country was the latest of my orders from the library system. Somehow it all comes together from the sort of narrative of loss and rediscovery that might make a Faulks plot but without quite so much heartbreak.

The theme of Viennese psychiatry is continued from Human Traces but with only traces of that story re-emerging so Snow Country can be read alone without knowledge of the earlier book. Advances in the treatment of mental illness, such as they were, prompt some discussion of 'what it is to be human' when personality breaks down and leaves only what looks like emptiness at its centre,

And this is what the agonies of those people had come down to. A name and a diagnosis with many outriding question marks; slight improvements, blank journal entries when ideas had run short, letters of discharge, death certificates.

An early review saw the book as heavily-laden with ideas and implied it was more like an essay attached to a story but that is to undervalue the broad sweep of its historical development and the places of Anton and Lena in it. It's possible that Faulks might be suspected of overdoing the emotional pull at times but that's what he does and he does it very well.

Anton becomes a writer and gets a commission to do a piece about the schloss established for the treatment of mental illness in Human Traces. There's always another layer, as in books like Atonement, when a story has in it someone writing an alternative account. His first love is Delphine and when he meets Lena he asks her to act as her surrogate.

Lena earns money in Vienna by entertaining men and enjoying it without ever being a 'line girl'. Her first love is Rudolf, a Social Democrat fighting a losing battle as mitteleuropa lurches to the far right between the wars.

Martha, who runs the sanitorium, is devoted to her work. If the climax of the plot seems to be Anton finding that Delphine died in a religious retreat in 1918, aged 42, the crisis in 1933 with the violent death of Rudolf and the inevitable rise of fascism and the resolution of Anton and Lena finding a second-best devotion to each other shows that emotional plateau to be base camp on the way to the summit.

Perhaps it's a bit much but the body count and hyperbole in the drama of Hamlet don't prevent that from being one of the greatest works in Eng. Lit. and Faulks manages to bring in the idea that Shakespeare 'invented human nature', and

Before that, they appeared to one another as two-dimensional.

It is persuasive even if one feels one is being manipulated somewhat. I didn't do much else today apart from read it and one feels better for having done so. There's something slightly 'popular' about Sebastian Faulks's books that make me at least suspect he's not quite the greatest living English novelist but one can't fault his research, his large-scale design or his accumulation of ideas and I read them all while never finding time for so many other highly-praised fiction writers so he must be doing something right.