What makes a life? What determines how and why we become the people we do, over a lifetime? What electrical impulses or conjunction of atoms create "this miracle of thought in flesh"? And what does it mean to have lived?
These questions have underpinned Sebastian Faulks's fiction since the beginning. But it was his seventh novel, Human Traces, that explored most explicitly this relationship between thought and flesh and the historical mapping of it through the stories of two 19th-century doctors. These same concerns are watermarked through A Possible Life, a novel that takes the form of five biographical portraits, each a self-contained novella but carrying echoes of the lives that go before and after, like the movements of a symphony. Sometimes these connections consist of a physical object – a statue or a building – linking two characters a century apart. More often they are less tangible; ripples sent out through history by one small act of kindness, one chance meeting.
The book begins in familiar Faulks territory, with the narrative of Geoffrey Talbot, a young prep school teacher who, in 1939, finds himself volunteering for undercover operations in occupied France. The following narratives shuttle back and forth across the 19th and 20th centuries and into our own, sharp with historical detail. After Geoffrey comes Billy, a workhouse boy whose grit lifts his children out of Victorian poverty into the prospect of a different kind of life.
The central story belongs to Elena Duranti, and is the only one that projects forward from the present into an imagined near future. A solitary child who grows up in a rural Italy decimated by economic crisis, Elena becomes a neuroscientist celebrated for discovering the elusive locus of self-awareness in the brain; proof, in other words, that there is no such thing as the "soul". Her discovery is fictional but based closely on real case studies; Faulks is concerned with what such a discovery might mean for our collective sense of our humanity. "Knowing one was comprised of recycled matter only and that selfhood was a delusion did not take away the aching of the heart."
Each of the lives unfolded here, in their distinctive voices, yearns towards the comprehension of this paradox. To varying degrees they seek connection with others, whether through sex, words, music or silence. Though their stories are necessarily compressed, Faulks makes his characters real with spare, careful details. From the unspeakable horrors Geoffrey witnesses in his German prison camp to the striving after perfect self-expression of the young folk singer Anya King in the book's final story, the writing is masterfully controlled, without a word wasted. Avoiding excess emotion, Faulks evokes a deep compassion for all his troubled characters and, by extension, for all of us who share their condition. As Jack, the narrator of the final section, says: "The events and the sensations, the stories and the things that make me what I am in the eyes of other people, the list of facts that make my life… They could be mine, they might be yours."
A Possible Life is a profound novel; if it lacks the obvious narrative drive of works such as Charlotte Gray or Birdsong, it compensates by exploring big ideas without compromising the human drama. It is also, ultimately, an optimistic work. We may be no more than matter but we can, in various ways, outlive our short lifespan, perhaps never knowing how far our ripples will reach.
