Though not generally intimidated by big books, I will admit to experiencing a faint sense of trepidation on the morning when Human Traces crashed tumultuously on to the door-mat. A quarter of a million words long, weighing in at something over 2lb on the bathroom scales (slightly less than Chambers Biographical Dictionary, about the same as The Selected Letters of Philip Larkin), it is, additionally, a history of late 19th-century psychiatry masquerading as a work of fiction. It says something for Sebastian Faulks’s novelising skills that, 600 pages and innumerable sittings later, the characters grouped on its foredeck are never quite overshadowed by the mountain of baggage protruding from the hold.

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