Product Description

`Fould's exceptional novel is like a lucid dream... the word-perfect fruit of a poet's sharp eye and novelist's limber reach.'

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1630 in Books
• Published on: 2009-05-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 272 pages

Review
" The language is simple, sometimes adorned with fleeting and apt images: the sky is `cloud-breeding', summer clouds are `curds' --Literary Review

`a vividly sympathetic exploration of poetry, madness and identity.'
--The Week

`It's a work of strikingly beautiful, unforced writing'
--Daily Express

Foulds was becoming the pin-up boy of contemporary poets...this beautifully described novel suggests he's equally a master of prose'. --Radio Times

Review
'The world he evokes...is conjured up with remarkable intensity and economy of means'

Review
`impressive ... this success is the concentration of Fould's writing, both simultaneously poised and flowing in its urgency'

Customer Reviews

An insightful recreation, beautifully written
From 1837 to 1841, John Clare, the peasant poet, was a patient in a private asylum in the Epping Forest. Clare and his wife Patty had six children and life was proving increasingly burdensome to Clare, who began to suffer bouts of severe depression, leading to alarmingly erratic behaviour and serious delusions. In The Quickening Maze, Adam Foulds has written an imaginative recreation of Clare's years in the High Beech Asylum, and while the result is firmly fictional, the picture presented is realistic and consistent with the known history.

The book is sparsely written. Foulds does not write lengthy descriptive or scene-setting passages, but each small vignette contributes to a rich picture of the cloistered life of a 19th century private asylum. This is no mad-house. The asylum is run on orderly lines by Dr Matthew Allen, a thoughtful man who likes to get to know his patients. However, the finances of the asylum are precarious and Foulds describes Allen's attempts to mix the cure of souls with mechanical invention and patents. Poor Allen finds his time increasingly spent trying to "diversify his business", but without success.

In the meantime, the patients are allowed a relative freedom, and for a while John Clare is allowed a day-pass from his confinement, a privilege he abuses by staying overnight with gypsies and returning much the worse for wear. I found the section where Clare is with his gypsy friends particularly well-written, showing the considerable research Foulds has put into this book. The detailed description of how to prepare a hedgehog for the pot is particularly enlightening.

Alas, despite his occasional forays beyond the asylum, John Clare's mind is far from peace. When not inhabiting his real persona as the gentle poet of hedgerow and field, he becomes a belligerent prize-fighter, Jack Randall, who picks fights wherever he goes (and the injuries to go with them - perhaps not surprising in view of Clare's five-foot stature and his poor physical health). At other times he becomes Lord Byron and in his more lucid moments actually re-writes some of Byron's poems.

Adam Foulds has cleverly inter-leaved the appearance of another poet into his narrative: Alfred Tennyson, who accompanies his mentally-ill brother during his stay at High Beech. Tennyson lives in a nearby cottage and becomes the focus of attention of the Matthew Allen's 17 year-old daughter Hannah who manages to inveigle Tennyson into conversations as at attempt at forcing his interest in her as a potential fiancée. The two poets, Clare and Tennyson, do not really meet up in the novel other than "in passing", and of course, Tennyson would not have been particularly impressed by Clare's rustic verse, for it took many years after his death before Clare's heritage was fully appreciated.

This is a fine book. Adam Foulds captures atmosphere well and we also get a fine sense of the depths of 19th century Epping Forest - a place holding many secrets and where it was easy to become lost. Readers will gain a strong sense of the secluded little community on the edge of the forest. Foulds has researched the 19th century treatment of mental illness and we gain insight into how one of the more humane asylums operated. Rather than the horrors of the Victorian Bedlam, we get glimpses of a far more compassionate and humane institution built around a domestic world created by a real family and their friends.

Two Poets in the Madhouse
`He'd been sent out to pick firewood from the forest, sticks and timbers wrenched loose in the storm'.

The novel opens with John Clare, the peasant poet, as a village boy exploring the world and finding his way home to his loving mother. It ends with his long walk home to Northampton from Essex and being found by his wife Patty. John Clare has been an inmate of Mathew Allen's asylum - a man enlightened for his day but obsessed with business success and not a good businessman, as we find out in one of the narrative strands of this novel.

Foulds is a poet and imagines himself into John Clare's world very well - his day out from the asylum in the wood, and at one with nature and with the gypsies, is beautifully written and lingers in the mind. It is in sharp contrast to the confusion in the asylum itself.

Allen's daughter Hannah has her own narrative thread - finding a suitable husband - and it is gripping partly because her options are so limited. The Tennyson brothers, from a melancholy family, are staying whilst Septimus receives treatment. Alfred, later Lord Tennyson is the object of Hannah's romantic interest and she takes the initiative, visiting him:

`She thought of a question that might startle him into a renewed appreciation of her. He would know at least how advanced, how daring she was.
`May I ask you, what is your opinion of Lord Byron's poetry?'

Byron is still a daring poet for a young girl to read. She hopes to dazzle him with her intellectual and sensual abilities if not with her beauty.

Clare, in his madness, thinks that he is Byron at times, at times he thinks himself a boxer.

I am never sure about novels based on real characters and this book is certainly not fully successful from a structural perspective - insufficient narrative pull. For me, in this case Foulds' imagination wins the day; atmosphere and language triumph over the narrative issues.

A book about John Clare the poet, apparently
I have never heard of the poet John Clare, and I don't generally read the blurbs of books until after I have finished them. Therefore, it was something of a surprise to discover in the last dozen pages of The Quickening Maze that Mr Clare had been the star of the show.

As it presents itself, The Quickening Maze is the story of Matthew Allen and his psychiatric hospital somewhere in the depths of Epping Forest. The hospital has its resident patients - a motley crew ranging from the eccentric and embarrassing offspring of aristocrats through to very deluded individuals. There are the various friends and family of Allen - many of them female and all of then completely interchangeable. And then there is Tennyson, who accompanies his ailing brother to the hospital. Throw in a couple of patients - John Clare and Margaret/Mary - and some gypsies and the scene is set. Set for confusion.

The story of Allen and his grand ideas for making money was easy enough to follow - albeit one which didn't really kick off until half way in. It was actually quite a compelling story and cuts away to other narrative strands started to become intrusive. The various couplings were less easy to follow, although there was a general will he/won't he angle to Hannah's hopes of marriage to Tennyson. But perhaps the hardest to follow was John Clare. The Clare story appeared to be filler between the real plot, as he veered between lucidity as he wandered off to play with the gypsies; delusion as he fancied himself as a boxer or a Byron; and utter madness when in the company of Margaret/Mary. There didn't seem to be any insight into who Clare was or what really made him tick. And until the final pages which gave a synopsis of the rest of his life, there was no indication that he was a character who needed to be understood.

The real star of the show was Epping Forest, which embraced all the action like a thick and impenetrable cloak. The forest was a world apart; a world where Matthew Allen was lord and master of all he surveyed; a world where he and his hospital were not constrained by the rule of law. Unfortunately, the forest was simply not enough to tie together the disparate strands of story which just fizzled gently in no particular direction.

Perhaps the lack of narrative drive would have worked with the beauty of the language to carry it through. But despite having two poets on the team, the prose was alternately plodding or just irritatingly scatalogical. There was little to keep the reader reading. And to get to the end without realizing who the novel was about is a pretty poor indictment. An author should not need a blurb to explain what a book's about - the book should be self-explanatory.

Ho hum - a Booker longlister. Rather a lean year for British and Commonwealth writers, methinks.