The publisher's blurb on the back reads:

In the 1870s, two ambitious boys from different backgrounds, Jacques Rebière and Thomas Midwinter, find themselves united by a determination to understand how the mind works and whether madness is the price we pay for being human.

As pioneering psychiatrists, their quest takes them from an English county lunatic asylum to the plains of Africa, the lecture rooms of Paris and the mountains of Austria and California. They are guided by Thomas's devoted sister, Sonia, and by an ex-patient, Katharina, whose arrival exposes profound differences between them. As the concerns of the old century fade and the First World War divides Europe, the two friends are compelled to a tragic revision of all that they have loved and pursued.

To my mind the writing is very good, the characters are well rounded, and well portrayed, and the descriptions of the English Victorian "lock them up and forget them" lunatic asylum contrast with the scientific and clinical approach in a Paris hospital. However, once they two doctors set up their own clinic, the writing becomes dominated by explaining two different theories of mental illness, and the book became hard going for me. The First World War and its consequences for the characters brings the book back on track, and sets up an unexpected ending, but I'd already lost my reading momentum by then.

RELEASE NOTES:

The OBCZ bookshelf under the stairs

Taken with me from Hotel De Doelen. It can take some time before I read it!

Impressive novel. Succesful as an panoramic historical novel in the broad sense (beautiful descriptions about life in the Victorian Age), but for me it was too much a lecture in the history of psychiatry and especially an idea-history about some diseases. It took some time for I had the time, concentration and motivation to read this thick (786 pages)and serieus book, but in the end I glad I read it.

Received from Irenne. Interesting book, especially the parts about schizofrenia. The book is too thick and too ambitious because it wants to reach to many readers from different target groups. The novel was very much a history about psychiatry but at the same time it didn't give the whole history of ideas about psychiatry.