We know what the characters only suspect: political optimism is misplaced in 1930s Vienna This will be familiar territory to fans of Faulks’s hugely successful Birdsong trilogy, but with Snow Country – despite a highly charged opening scene in a field hospital – his focus is less on the frontline drama of warfare than the prelude and aftermath of conflict, and the narrative moves between corresponding states of foreboding and reflection, rarely looking directly at the great war itself. Sixteen years on, Faulks has returned to the terrain of Human Traces, geographically and thematically, with his new novel, Snow Country, the second in a planned Austrian trilogy that spans the first half of the 20th century and the reshaping of Europe through war. Its two central characters, Thomas Midwinter and Jacques Rebière, are psychiatrists with opposing views on maladies of the mind who pool their expertise to found a state-of-the-art sanatorium in the Austrian mountains at the end of the 19th century. S ebastian Faulks’s 2005 novel, Human Traces, made explicit his ongoing fascination with the mystery of human consciousness and the forces – historical, political and biological – that converge to shape an individual life.
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