Negative Positive
Title: Mental health
Review: This huge novel spans the careers of two pioneering psychiatrists, one French, one English, who meet as boys and eventually co-found a sanatorium in the mountains of Austria, until driven apart by professional disagreements and the outbreak of the first War. For the first 250 pages of this 600-page book, the story holds the interest with warm characters, fascinating settings, and the stirrings of romance. However, the long lectures and scientific papers that Faulks uses to demonstrate the growing differences between the two (one is a Freudian, the other a Darwinian) come to clog the book around the half-way point, and although the two men continue to develop in interesting ways as people, he loses the sense of linear narrative. But Faulks pulls it all together in the last hundred pages; always a magnificent war novelist (seeBIRDSONG, his masterpiece), his WW1 scenes appear almost as a lyrical interlude, with striking cathartic effect, and his final chapters have their own quiet beauty.
Is the review positive or negative? 