5/29/2023 0 Comments Author of on chesil beach![]() ![]() When Thomas visits the Olduvai Gorge in Africa he sees mother and child footprints of early humanoids. The book centrally concerns the medical researches and practices in the field of mental illness of two friends, Jacques Rebiere and Thomas Midwinter. The title word 'traces' has a poised ambivalence here, connoting something both ephemeral and lasting. Faulks in this novel, as in his 1998 novel Charlotte Gray, is interested in the transitory nature of the individual life, and the degree to which love may invest that little life with significance. In many respects these novels are more like previous works by the same writer than each other. ![]() On Chesil Beach, some 160 pages long, ends, given flashbacks, a few hours after it begins, in the eponymous English location in the early 1960s. Human Traces, some 600 pages long, begins in the mid-nineteenth century in Brittany, ends soon after the First World War, and takes place in Europe, North America and Africa. Although they are both strong in evoking earlier eras, the novels are strikingly different in length and scope. The two novels are Human Traces by Sebastian Faulks (2005), and On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan (2007). I found myself not only seeing relationships between the two but also making links between them and other works by those two writers. ![]() Here I compare two novels I recently read. Comparison is something we all do as readers. ![]()
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