Sebastian Faulks, Snow Country

- Once again Sebastian Faulks has written a hugely enjoyable novel with characters struggling on the margins of a society under immense political pressure and contending with the realities of revolution and war. 

- The central focus is Austria leading up to and after the first world war, and the subsequent emergence of fascism in Europe. Austria was a premonition of Hitler's Germany. The young journalist Anton and the poor and uneducated Lena, who turns to prostitution to support herself, are contending with the fragility of societies being pulled apart by political and economic pressures from all sides. Good people are suffering and dying, and lives and relationships struggling. Other characters in the novel bring these tensions vividly to life. 

- Vienna was also the centre of psychoanalysis in the Freudian tradition and the contentious debates around treatments and therapy. The human mind and its subtle dynamics became a central focus.

 ...'I came to have a low view of the human creature, the male in particular. He seems to be a deformed animal.'

'What do you mean?'

'We are obsessive,' Anton said. 'We appear to have bigger brains than other creatures, but we behave in a way that's contrary to our own interests. These harmful passions that drive us mad with love or with the need to slaughter one another. We don't seem very well...evolved.'

- Snow Country is the second in Faulks' Austrian trilogy, the first being Human Traces published in 2005 which I haven't read. But I did enjoy immensely his last novel Paris Echo set during the Nazi occupation of Paris in the early 1940s. (See my review here). Faulks' gift is to write love stories set in fractious times, and to bring the personal and social brilliantly alive.