The Quickening Maze

by Adam Foulds

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize

After a lifetime's struggle with alcohol, critical neglect and depression, in 1840 the nature poet John Clare is incarcerated. The asylum, in London's Epping Forest, is run on the reformist principles of occupational therapy. At the same time, the young Alfred Tennyson, moves nearby and became entangled in the life of the asylum. This historically accurate, intensely lyrical novel, describes the asylum's closed world and Nature's paradise outside the walls: Clare's dream of home, of redemption, of escape.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Historical, Literary Fiction, British Literature, Poetry, Novels

259 pages, Paperback

First published May 7, 2009

About the author

Adam Foulds (born 1974) is a British novelist and poet.

He was educated at Bancroft's School, read English at St Catherine's College, Oxford under Craig Raine, and graduated with an MA in creative writing from the University of East Anglia in 2001. Foulds published The Truth About These Strange Times, a novel, in 2007. This won a Betty Trask Award. The novel, which is set in the present day, is concerned in part with the World Memory Championships, and earned him the title of Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year. The report of this in The Sunday Times included the information that he had previously worked as a fork-lift truck driver.

In 2008 Foulds published a substantial narrative poem entitled The Broken Word, described by the critic Peter Kemp as a "verse novella". It is a fictional version of some events during the Mau Mau Uprising. Writing in The Guardian, David Wheatley suggested that "The Broken Word is a moving and pitiless depiction of the world as it is rather than as we might like it to be, and the terrible things we do to defend our place in it". The book was short-listed for the 2008 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize[6] and won the poetry prize in the Costa Book Awards. In 2009 Foulds was again shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award and won a Somerset Maugham Award.

In 2009 his novel The Quickening Maze was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Recommending the work in a 'books of the year' survey, acclaimed novellist Julian Barnes declared: 'Having last year greatly admired Adam Foulds's long poem The Broken Word, I uncharitably wondered whether his novel The Quickening Maze (Cape) might allow me to tacitly advise him to stick to verse. Some hope: this story of the Victorian lunatic asylum where the poet John Clare and Tennyson's brother Septimus were incarcerated is the real thing. It's not a "poetic novel" either, but a novelistic novel, rich in its understanding and representation of the mad, the sane, and that large overlapping category in between'.
On 7th January 2010 he was published on the Guardian Website's "Over by Over" (OBO) coverage of day five of the Third Test of the South Africa v England series at Newlands, Cape Town. Fould's published email corrected the OBO writer, Andy Bull, who, in the 77th over, posted lines by Donne in reference to Ian Ronald Bell in verse form:

"No doubt I won't be the first pedant to let you know that the Donne you quote is in fact from a prose meditation. The experiment in retrofitting twentieth century free verse technique to it is interesting but the line breaks shouldn't really be there."

--Wikipedia

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 4 out of 5]

Creativity and madness are close and they may flow one into the other but at times, they may be quite ruinous. The Quickening Maze is a brilliant analysis of human creative consciousness.

‘May I ask you, what is your opinion of Lord Byron’s poetry?’
He did indeed raise both eyebrows at that, blowing long cones of smoke from his nostrils. He answered quite wonderfully with a revelation.
‘A very great deal. His poetry, well…’ Here he perhaps decided against a critical disquisition. She thought he might not think her up to it, but what he said instead pleased her just as well. ‘I remember when he died. I was a lad. I walked out into the woods full of distress at the news. It was the thought of all he hadn’t yet written, all bright inside him, being lost for ever, lowered into darkness for eternity. I was most gloomy and despondent. I scratched his name onto a rock, a sandstone rock. It must still be there, I should think.’

Time is the greatest judge of art… Some names are blown by the wind of time into oblivion like fluff… And some names it carves in the rock of eternity to remain in the human memory forever.

[Bionic Jean · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Quickening Maze promised to be such a good read, tailor-made for me. An award-winning novel about the poets, Alfred, Lord Tennyson and John Clare, set in Epping Forest, among the trees which I love. Epping Forest is an ancient woodland which straddles the border between Greater London and Essex. It is a protected woodland area of conservation, and where it is left alone, a little paradise; a pastoral haven of natural beauty:



Part of High Beach, Epping Forest

The novel takes place at High Beach, which I happened to be driven through only this morning, admiring the early Autumn sunlight filtering through the trees. Epping Forest itself is now a strange mix. A few crisscrossed roads dividing the huge woodland, mean that it has become a commuter area for London. Yet it also preserves its identity as an ancient woodland, with areas of grassland, heath, rivers, bogs and ponds. A century ago, the commuter belt did not exist as such, but the forest would have been largely the same.

From a literary point of view, its interest lies in the fact that the poets Wilfred Owen and Edward Thomas were both stationed there during the first world war, although there is no evidence that they actually met.

And just over seventy years earlier, two other major English poets had also briefly lived in this small area, thanks to a doctor called Matthew Allen. Doctor Matthew Allen had founded a mental institution, called the “High Beach Private Asylum”, where both John Clare and the young Alfred Tennyson stayed. It is not known whether these two very different poets ever met, and in The Quickening Maze they never do, but Adam Foulds has combined known facts with imagined fictional events about this, to create his novel. Several years are compressed into seven seasons so that the book starts in one Autumn, and finishes in the Spring of the next year but one. The sections are titled this way, and it increases the feeling that this novel is embedded in the natural world.

As we begin the novel we quickly become aware that the “John”, so immersed in his forest life, thinking his thoughts as poems, and hating to be confined indoors, is in fact John Clare, the nature poet. It is 1837, and after a lifetime’s struggle with alcoholism, depression, and critical neglect, he has been incarcerated in High Beach Asylum, reported as being “full of many strange delusions” and deranged behaviour. When he is more in his right mind, he feels increasingly isolated. He wanders about Epping Forest talking to the wood-burners and local gypsies. They welcome and accept his visits, as he has an open face, seems no threat, and tells them that he knew some romanies in Northamptonshire, where he had learned a smattering of their language.

The gypsies suspect that he comes from the large institution, and are kind to him, sharing their poaching hauls, and allowing him to fantasise, immersing himself in the glorious woodland, and obsessively pour out his nature poems. We view this at first hand, as Adam Foulds imaginatively describes John Clare’s delusional behaviour, and memory lapses. Sometimes John Clare believes himself to be Jack Randall, a prize-fighting boxer, at others Lord Byron, either in poetic mode or boxing bouts. The personas of Shakespeare or Admiral Nelson occasionally take over him too, and once Robinson Crusoe. At other times he believes that Wordsworth and Byron have stolen his best poems, and published them as their own. We witness these multiple personalities which plague him, and see that clearly John Clare must be schizophrenic, with some kind of bi-polar disorder, and have an identity crisis. Although he seems to have moments of sanity, two doctors had pronounced him insane.

John Clare had begun to get some recognition as a poet, but had had to work hard as a labourer, to feed his large family of a wife, children and his elderly parents. In the asylum, however, what he mostly mourns is the absence of his home landscape, in Northamptonshire, and the loss of his two sweethearts. He continually confuses his childhood sweetheart, Mary, with his wife, Patty, who had borne him many children. When a patient tells him she is Mary, they have a primal sexual encounter in the forest, neither conscious of the reality of the episode. He has little sense of time, or where he is. John Clare is passionate in feeling that he is part of nature itself:

“Ants fly over, carry beyond him. He can’t follow them further. Like a lock gate opening in a canal, the water slumping in, his heavy rage returns. He presses himself to the tree, looks down and sees the roots reaching down into the earth. The admiral’s hands. He has them himself for a second, thick rooty fingers, twisted, numb. He shakes his hands and they’re gone.They reappear at his feet and clutch down. The painful numbness rises, his legs solidifying, a hard rind surrounding them, creeping upwards. He raises his arms. They crack and split and reach into the light. The bark covers his lips, covers his eyes.Going blind, he vomits leaves and growth. He yearns upwards into the air, dwindling, splitting, growing finer, to live points, to nerves. The wind moves agonisingly through him. He can’t speak.
Stands in the wilderness of the world.”

The gradual worsening of his mental confusion is described effectively, and with great immediacy, through descriptions like this.

Into this strangely cloistered world comes the young Alfred Tennyson, arriving with his brother Septimus, who is already Matthew Allen’s patient. Alfred is a gentleman, not a “peasant poet” like John Clare, and has already received more critical acclaim. Alfred Tennyson is to live nearby while his brother Septimus is treated for “melancholy”. These were not the only two members of the Tennyson family to have mental instability. Tennyson’s father himself seemed to have been unbalanced, and reacted to his virtual disinheritance by taking to drink and drugs, making the family’s life at home a misery. It is believed that a strain of epilepsy, a disease then thought to be brought on by sexual excess and therefore shameful, may have been responsible. Septimus was to be confined to an insane asylum for most of his life, another had recurrent bouts of addiction to drugs, a third had to be put into a mental home because of his alcoholism, and a fourth was confined periodically, and died relatively young.

Every one of the eleven children who reached maturity had at least one severe mental breakdown during their lives. At the time of this novel, Alfred thought that he had inherited epilepsy from his father, and that it was responsible for the trances into which he occasionally fell. Alfred himself is also under the doctor’s examination and care, as he is “deficient in animal spirits”, as he mourns the death of his friend, Arthur Hallam. Both Alfred and Septimus go on excursions together through the forest, although they seem to be solitary and rather sullen and inward-looking with others, and much given to introspection.

The first chapters are full of intensely detailed descriptions. It is clear that Adam Foulds himself is a poet, from the intricate pictures he creates. This is his third book and there are quite beautiful and dramatic descriptions of the forest, as he vividly conveys John Clare’s sensations. We see John Clare’s impulses to turn his responses to nature into poems, and observe the creative process. The descriptions are also very sensual and earthy, in parts. When in contrast we read about the forcible evacuation of the bowels of a large patient, who believed that if he allowed himself to excrete his bodily waste, it would pollute the entire London area and cause mass disease and death, in the same amount of detail, it is a grim and gross read. The juxtaposition of descriptions such as this, seems rather too conscious: a crude device to enhance the beauty of one, and the extreme unpleasantness of another. I had been expecting lyrical prose. Instead I was repeatedly thrust between confusion and grossness. There is a great deal about the sexual organs, and various bodily functions; visceral descriptions both real and imagined, both human and animal, living and dead. It is earthy and vulgar in its true sense, accurately conveying insane behaviour and rambling speech, or torrents of uncouth outpourings, so that the reader feels closely involved and repelled by obscenities.

The novel is quite fragmentary, and impressionistic. I found it difficult to engage with any of the characters, or feel any interest in them. The minutiae of the descriptions can be confusing, as the pages swerve from place to place, character to character, describing events from both sane and increasingly insane points of view.

There is a small cast of characters, mainly the inmates in the asylum and Matthew Allen’s own family. There is Eliza, his wife, their three daughters, Hannah, Dora and Abigail, and Fulton, his son. Hannah is their oldest daughter. At seventeen, she is fixated on men, marriage and her own — hopefully prosperous — future. Fed up with always being upstaged by her beautiful friend, Annabel, she likes the idea of having Alfred Tennyson living close by, and struggles to be noticed by the young handsome gentleman, hoping that he will take her away from her dreary life, observing wryly: “It can be a little difficult to command attention when surrounded by lunatics”. Hannah is quick-witted, and lonely in her intelligence. She reads widely and observes things. Will this relationship develop, or be doomed? Will she perhaps attract the attention of another beau? She seems almost destined to be a literary heroine, to add some human interest to this incessant odd prose, but the novel is not really structured to enable Hannah to feature much.

Interestingly, the main character, if anybody, is neither of the two poets, but the charismatic doctor, Matthew Allen. We recognise here a forward-thinking doctor; one in line with how we now think. Matthew Allen believes it is crucial to talk to his patients, and set them therapeutic physical tasks, in order to effect a cure. He gives John Clare as much free rein as he can, and unlike many, treats his poetry seriously. Matthew Allen only ever incarcerates any of his patients as a last resort. We see how the asylum was divided into two sections, by gender, for less severe cases, and a third for more dangerous patients: those apt to harm themselves. We are privy to his conversations with his patients, and also his efforts to reconcile his family life with his work. Matthew Allen is a bit of a name-dropper, frequenting “literary evenings in Bedford Square”, which leads his parsimonious (and rather obnoxious) older brother, Oswald, to disapprove and pour scorn on all Matthew’s connections, and by extension, his work. None of this seems to affect Matthew Allen’s belief in what he is doing however, and he perseveres doggedly with what now would be called the practice of occupational therapy.

One unpredictable and unlikely development of The Quickening Maze, is actually documented fact. Matthew Allen had a shady past and money worries. He had a history of debts, and had once been imprisoned for fraud. Convinced that there would be increased demand for luxury domestic furniture and ecclesiastical fittings in the new industrial age, Matthew Allen now became swept up in his own ideas. He has invented a mechanical wood-carving machine called the “Pyroglyph”. He believes that this will replace the need for expensive, skilled craftsmen, and visits the premises of a local businessmen Thomas Maudesley in Loughton, seeking his backing. Increasingly we see that he is a bit of a charlatan:

“When dealing with the mad, a virtual dishonesty is sometimes required. So with his investors: he would mislead them with ultimate rewards. His heart beat light and fast with the pleasure of his own cleverness.”

Amazingly, Matthew Allen’s dogged enthusiasm convinces others, including Tennyson and his three sisters, to invest almost £8,000 — a huge sum in the mid 1800s — in developing his half-baked scheme. Tennyson was to lose much of his family’s fortunes in this disastrous investment, and the family’s funds were severely depleted.

As well as this intriguing subplot, we follow the actions of Matthew Allen’s chief attendant, William Stockdale. He is a thug and a bully, torturing the patients, often using his fists on John, and sexually assaulting the female patients, especially Margaret. Margaret is convinced that God speaks to her. She sees and talks to angels, and has graphic visions of the crucifixion. Confused into thinking she is the Virgin Mary, she is sexually abused by attendant and patient alike.

Other inmates include George Laidlaw, who is obsessed with the national debt, a woman who believes herself to be a witch, and one who is sane, but there for the convenience of others, rather than any personality disorder. Charles Seymour is a member of an aristocratic family, but has been placed in the asylum by his family, so that he will be unable to marry his lover, who the family consider to be unsuitable. The various descriptive passages, such as those of sexual violence between those in the asylum, are powerful, but not easy to read.

The book ends with Tennyson about to return to his family home, determined to begin writing serious work on a memorial, in honour of his friend Arthur Hallam. This was to become “In Memoriam”. After the failure of Matthew Allen’s mechanical invention, he is declared bankrupt, and his own sanity seems to be questionable. The inmates are all released from the asylum. John Clare is increasingly disturbed, but at last manages to achieve his dream of escape. Aided by the gipsies, he runs away, and starts the long arduous walk back to his home, a cottage in the village of Helpston, near Peterborough:



John Clare’s Cottage in Helpston

This walking journey back to his beloved Northamptonshire landscape, and to the woman whom he, in his state of delusion, believed to be his childhood sweetheart Mary, was to take John Clare four painful days. In fact Mary had been dead for many years. Patty, his wife, finally rescued him in a cart near to home. However, he was only to stay with her for few months, before being admitted to “Northampton General Lunatic Asylum”, where he was to remain for the next twenty-three years, ie., for the rest of his life. He continued to write poetry, and his verses were collected under the title “Asylum Poems”.He died in 1864.

Names such as Loughton and Woodford stood out to me, and near the end of the book I recognised a church which is just at the top of a main road, a few minutes’ walk away. But this feature, although enjoyable, is mere coincidence, and largely inconsequential.

Every time I had looked at the cover of this book on my shelves I made a mental note to save it up, so that I could immerse myself in it. But the reality was that I found it disappointing: difficult to enjoy, and in parts too grotesque to be absorbing. The critics feel differently, and rave reviews commend it as a “deeply affecting book: a visionary novel”, or “a subtle meditation on the mysterious nature of the creative process”. They bandy around words like “poetic” and “lyrical grace”, or “brilliantly imagined”,“elegant and riveting” with its “rapturous prose and vivid exploration of poetry and madness”.

There are certainly intense descriptions of the natural world, but I’m not sure this is what I look for in a novel, however literary it is. It is too fragmentary and impressionistic: of the moment, with a stream of consciousness feeling. Where is the character development? Or any action, or tension in the plot. The structure and form do not engage me. Here is a description I do find accurate, written by the John Clare Society, when it was first published in 2009:

“The Quickening Maze” is a heady mix of delicacy and grotesquery, intimacy and misanthropy.”

If this intrigues you, then please don’t be put off from reading this novel by my thoughts. You may well feel differently.

But I prefer to read the poetry itself:

“All nature has a feeling: woods, fields, brooks
Are life eternal: and in silence they
Speak happiness beyond the reach of books;
There’s nothing mortal in them; their decay
Is the green life of change; to pass away
And come again in blooms revivified.
Its birth was heaven, eternal it its stay,
And with the sun and moon shall still abide
Beneath their day and night and heaven wide.”

And here is one of John Clare’s Asylum poems, devoted to all lovers who have to hide their feelings:

“Secret Love

I hid my love when young till I
Couldn’t bear the buzzing of a fly;
I hid my love to my despite
Till I could not bear to look at light:
I dare not gaze upon her face
But left her memory in each place;
Where’er I saw a wild flower lie
I kissed and bade my love good-bye.

I met her in the greenest dells
Where dewdrops pearl the wood blue bells;
The lost breeze kissed her bright blue eye,
The bee kissed and went singing by,
A sunbeam found a passage there,
A gold chain round her neck so fair;
As secret as the wild bee’s song
She lay there all the summer long.

I hid my love in field and town
Till e’en the breeze would knock me down,
The bees seemed singing ballads o’er,
The fly’s bass turned a lion’s roar;
And even silence found a tongue,
To haunt me all the summer long;
The riddle nature could not prove
Was nothing else but secret love.”

And this lovely pastoral scene:

“The hoar frost lodges on every tree
On the round hay stack and the rushy lea
And the boy ere he fothers behind the stack stands
A stamping his feet and a knocking his hands
The shepherd goes tucking his hook in his arm
And makes the dog bark up the sheep to the farm
The ploughman though noisey goes silently now
And rubs off the ryhme with his arm from the plough
Kop kop to his horses he sings and no more
For winter grins keenly and singing is oer
Save just now and then in the midst of the day
When hoar feathered frost is all melted away
Then larks from the thurrows takes sunshine for spring
And mounts oer his head just a minute to sing
And cleaning his plough at the end of the land
He’ll hum lovely Jessey and sweet Peggy Band.”

[Katie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Most of this novel worked very well for me. It's set in an asylum in Epping Forest in 1840. The ambitious doctor always flirting with bankruptcy is a great character as is his daughter who is urgently seeking love, as an escape from living in the vicinity of the insane. When Alfred Tennyson arrives, accompanying his brother who is suffering with depression she falls in love with him.
Less successful for me was its renditions of madness. In his In the Wolf's Mouth there's a character suffering from shellshock. Here there are two insane characters, one of whom is the real life poet John Clare. Fould seems to like writing madness but for me his writing, so beautiful when he's writing about just about anything else, has a tendency to become histrionic when moments of insanity are the focus. His best dramatisation of madness was the much more understated portrait of the deluded female stalker in his most recent novel. He also has a tendency to include too many character narratives in his books, another foible he eliminated in his most recent novel.

[Roger Brunyate · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Lunatic, the Lover, and the Poet…

". . . are of imagination all compact," continues Shakespeare, and Adam Foulds might well have taken this for the motto of this novel. The setting is High Beach, a mental asylum run by Dr. Matthew Allen, on the fringes of Epping Forest, East of London. The time is the late eighteen-thirties. The poets are John Clare, a laborer's son briefly celebrated for his rural verse, and Alfred Tennyson, near the beginning of his own career. All three were real figures. Clare was to be institutionalized for the rest of his life, and largely forgotten only to be rediscovered a century later. Tennyson, himself a melancholic, bought a property nearby to be close to his brother Septimus, who committed himself to the asylum. And Allen was an extraordinary figure: "chemical philosopher, phrenologist, pedagogue, and mad-doctor," in the words of his biographer; add to that inventor, entrepreneur, and bankrupt. Adam Foulds has woven these factual strands into a tapestry of the imagination, set equally in the minds of its many characters and the revolving seasons of the English countryside.

The human world of High Beach is an often confusing jumble of inmates, attendants, visitors, members of Allen's family including his lovesick daughter Hannah, together with other assorted children, neighbors, and visitors. It is difficult to keep straight, and made more difficult still when an inmate suddenly starts calling himself by a different name. But although Allen has some sadistic attendants under his unwitting command, he is an enlightened doctor who allows his patients much liberty—so the world of nature interpenetrates everything. Foulds is at his best when closest to the countryside, as when John Clare wanders far from home as a boy in the prologue, or his several unauthorized excursions from High Beach to visit a nearby gypsy encampment. Or when one of the inmates, Margaret, has a religious vision in the woods: "The wind separated into thumps, into wing beats. An angel. An angel there in front of her. Tears fell like petals from her face. It stopped in front of her. Settling, its wings made a chittering sound. [...] It reached out with its beautiful hands to steady itself in the mortal world, touching leaves, touching branches, and left stains of brightness where it touched."

Like Maggie O'Farrell did in The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, and Faulkner knew before her, Foulds has discovered that the voices of madness permit a less literal approach to storytelling, in which desire and memory can play on an equal footing with fact. At its best, it is a highly evocative approach. But I am not convinced that he uses it to evoke anything very important—not, for instance, as Pat Barker had done in Regeneration when she placed the poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen in a mental hospital against the background of the Flanders trenches. Nor is there anything quite so compelling as Clare's own lines written from captivity: "And yet I am! and live with shadows, tost | Into the nothingness of scorn and noise, | Into the living sea of waking dreams, | Where there is neither sense of life nor joys, | But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems." Foulds can paint the seascape of those waking dreams, but he cannot experience the shipwreck.

But how does one really take a sane reader into the world of madness? Part of Foulds' strategy is to erase the boundaries between sane and insane. Shakespeare would suggest that there is not much difference between the lunatic and the poet, and with the very soft borders separating the various categories in Dr. Allen's establishment (not to mention the crazy enthusiasms of Allen himself), the two do seem to merge. But an empathetic portrayal of individual torment is really only possible when balancing on the brink, but still retaining some contact with sanity. Foulds' description of John Clare losing himself in the countryside as a boy already has the seeds of all that will become of him, both good and ill. Margaret's vision of the angel is about as far as Foulds could go and still have the reader see through her eyes. But when Clare (as he did) declares himself to be Byron or Shakespeare, the reader can only shake his head and pull back. If this novel lacks focus, as I fear it does, it may simply be because its target is beyond the reach of any lens.

[Karen· · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is not a dazzling, overwhelmingly entertaining sort of book, but rather one that works its magic quietly and subtly. The poet John Clare is an inmate of Matthew Allen's asylum, and Alfred Tennyson stays nearby with his melancholic brother Septimus, who is under Dr Allen's care. These are all historical figures, and part of the magic that Adam Foulds weaves is to make these people utterly real, with precise and cautious means. Foulds is beautifully, movingly sympathetic to all his characters, allowing us to feel for and with them. It is a complex symphony of different voices and perspectives, moving between the three men, Hannah, Allen's 17 year old daughter and her younger sister Abigail, and even inmates of the asylum. It shimmers exquisitely, but disturbs too.

There is an interview with Foulds at the Guardian's website:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/video...

He trusts the reader to do a little of the imaginative work with him. Thank you Mr Foulds.

[Geraldine Byrne · Rating 1 out of 5]

Step away from this book. Seriously, just put it down and walk away. Forget what you've read about its gentle lyricism or the fact it made the Booker short list. Just put it down and scarper. You'll thank me later.
It's not that it's badly written. In fact it's quite well written although if you are judging by some reviews you'll read you might be forgiven for expecting a lot more. But it's not bad.
What it is, is pointless. It's a neatly delivered pointless interlude. There is no heart to the story, nothing but reasonably well constructed quite poetic prose. No depth, no layers, the vague attempts to lend vitality to his characters doesn't disguise the clichés and ultimately there is no reason to care what happens. To anyone.
What should have resonated with pathos - the descent of the poet into madness - is sadly a boring, rather obvious walk in the forest with every aspect of the case underscored. Oh look, he's a poet who loves nature, let's have him walk around the countryside. Oh he's a bit mad, he is, let's have him do something a bit, you know, mad.
And we are never given a reason to care. About any of it. It's a small enough book but oh! the exquisite boredom.
Look, it's a nice day out. Or pissing rain, whatever. Anyway do yourself a favour. Get out now - you'll never get those two hours back

[Sue · Rating 4 out of 5]

This very interesting novel covers several years in the lives of the owners and inmates of an asylum for the insane in England in the 1840s.
It is the story of the nature poet John Clare who is slowly going mad, Dr Matthew Allen, the doctor charged with his care as well as the care of many other inmates, the extended Allen family, Alfred Tennyson who has brought his melancholic brother to High Beach for treatment, and staff members who vary from benign to horrific.

The setting itself is a character, most often seen through John's eyes and described in varying ways from serene to gritty, elegant to macabre depending on his mental state. While this asylum is said to be one of the best of the time, we see that it is really at times running itself as Allen spends his times dreaming of "higher" pursuits, money making schemes that will make his fortune and his name. At times he appears as delusional as his patients.

The most rational people seen are the gypsies who live off the land and, by the end of the story, are being driven away. They know who they are and have no pretensions.

The writing is wonderful in its ability to describe things seen and felt. It is poetic; at times it is poetry as John and Alfred attempt to write with limited success. The descriptions of the walks through the field and forest are sometimes glorious and sometimes terrifying, reflecting John's mood. Fould's ability to use language to express mood was successful for this reader.

I would recommend this to readers of historical fiction, poetry.

[Lisa - *OwlBeSatReading* · Rating 1 out of 5]

For goodness sake my bookish choices are questionable lately! 🥴

I gave this a go as I want to read more Booker noms but got as far as page 15 before I tossed it over my shoulder. I ACTUALLY TOSSED IT OVER MY SHOULDER, and THIS is why -

”He licked silky butter from his teeth and would much rather have been eating her, the prettyish, pale thing. He wondered how she tasted in the nest between her legs”.

No no no no no no no. 🤮

Thankfully, I found this in a charity shop for a quid and they’ll be getting it right back again.

[Barb · Rating 1 out of 5]

Okay, some people are going to love this novel...I think that they are the same people who loved 'The Gathering' by Anne Enright. If you like poetry and literature that is on the crazy disjointed end of the spectrum this might be your cup of tea, sadly it was not mine.

This is one of those books that you think you might be able to snarf down in half a day because it's pretty short, has a large font and lots of blank pages between the chapters. But when you get into it you see that it's the other kind of book, the one with not so many words but words that are hard to get through quickly. Some people like this style of writing, you know who you are, others do not. You can see which category I fall into.

I didn't like any of these characters but was moved to weeping by the ending...I think mental illness must be one of the most difficult curses on the planet.

I thought the story was interesting, the characters were interesting, but I really dislike this style of writing. It felt like there was little if any tension for the majority of the story and then suddenly the writer reveals some very disturbing events. The note I wrote to myself as I was reading says 'nothing happens and then everything happens - enough to make you sick.'

I would recommend this for people who like depressing poetry and reading about what might be going on inside the mind of the mentally ill.

[Soumen Daschoudhury · Rating 3 out of 5]

As I raise my head from the period marking the last sentence, last word of this book, I wonder.
I wonder!
What did I just finish reading? A lunatic poets’ longing and desperate cry for nature, being trapped within the fenced and tethered life of an asylum; nature, the source of his creations or was it a tiring tread into the discolored faded lives of the sane in the proximity of the senseless, the insane?

Rather, it’s a story of despair, of balancing and swaying on that thin line between sanity and insanity and knowing or else fooling yourself on which side of the barbed wire you exist.
Madness has always been an enigma, intriguing. So I expected exactly the same from this book, madness, but alas! Neither a tragic comedy nor a comic tragedy. It is an assortment of varying degrees of hope. John Clare, a poet, now a patient at the asylum run with neglect by Dr. Mathew Allen, longs for freedom, the wilderness as he experiences amidst the gypsies, for his home. Alfred Tennyson, another forthcoming poet’s arrival at Dr. Allen’s abode due to the admission of his brother in the asylum brings forth hope to the doctor’s daughter Hannah, a chance for courtship. Tennyson’s arrival also strengthens the entrepreneurial hopes of Dr. Allen but both father and daughter are denied and deprived of the charm and blessings of Lady Luck and remain stranded in their own peripheries.

Like a restless lunatic himself, the writer Adam Foulds flits from one character to another, shamelessly. But there is little to complain since he, with his immaculate writing style and like a maverick mind reader describes beautifully, in simple yet strong renditions, the nuances of helplessness, the pain and despair of each character. He is bold yet gentle with his sketches and the celebration of this camaraderie keeps you hooked on till you read the last word, to stay and share the lives of each character.

Adam Foulds, through this novel seems to float aimlessly on clouds of nothingness, but as I drifted along with him, I was lost at times, but emerged happy, to be on this journey.

[Vernon Goddard · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was attracted by the idea of this book - essentially about John Clare one of my favourite poets, set in the asylum period which could prove interesting and written by Adam Foulds, a poet of considerable merit in his own right. So, a book to relish and enjoy.

Anyone who is conversant with Clare's work and life, knows the beauty of his poetry and the horridness of his rejections and the absurdity and difficulties of his time locked away. I thought this book would add to my knowledge and possibly contribute additional factors in my understanding of Clare's life.

The book is about Clare's time at the asylum surrounded by other characters who weave in/out of his life.

There are the gypsies of the Forest. There is Dr Matthew Allen who manages the asylum in a reasonably sensible, humane and compassionate way. He treats his patients well, talking to them trying to understand and help. But Dr Allen has problems of his own. The asylum’s finances are in a poor state, His efforts to put things onto a firmer footing and advance his work are radical. They may work, but there is a very real risk that they may not. Meanwhile a very different poet, Alfred Tennyson, accompanies his mentally-ill brother during his stay at High Beech. And he draws the attention of Dr Allen’s 17 year-old daughter Hannah who determines to win his heart.

But the stories of these characters are fragmented and do not always relate. There's a great deal going on but not sufficient detail or weight to carry it. The writing can be intense, lyrical and quite beautiful in its simplicity but it did not always suit the narrative.

So I was troubled by the novel as I was reading it and thoroughly perplexed and annoyed by the time I finished it. I almost did not complete it. And so the potentially great book I thought I was going to read was spoiled in the end by a content which did not match the blurb and a style of writing I found inadequate and troublesome.

[Bella (Kiki) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Shortlisted for the 2009 Booker

The High Beach Private Asylum, at the edge of the Epping Forest, is the place where Alan Foulds’ beautiful, poetic, and elegiac novel, The Quickening Maze takes place. The asylum had been founded by a Scottish doctor, Matthew Allen, who lived with his family on the property. The English nature poet, John Clare was sheltered at High Beach from 1837 to 1841. He was, more-or-less, unable to tell fantasy from reality and he becomes completely delusional by the book’s end, believing himself to be Lord Byron and married to his first love, Mary, as well as to his actual wife, Patty.

As the book opens, Dr. Allen and his family are awaiting Alfred Tennyson and his brother, Septimus. It is Septimus who is in need of psychiatric treatment for depression, though Alfred, after the death of his father, suffers significant upheaval and hardship himself. As a result, he decides to move to High Beach in 1837. This brings Allen in close association with both Clare and Tennyson, who, ironically, never meet. It also makes Allen and his family, especially his teenage daughter, Hannah, the center of the book, though I think most people will be interested in Alfred Tennyson, since he is the best known.

Matthew Allen was known as a humane physician, but in business matters, he was something of a scoundrel who was open to scams and illegal schemes to make money. Clare, whose hold on reality was weakening day-by-day, was still able to recognize that Allen’s business practices were more than a bit dodgy, whereas Tennyson trusted Allen far too much.

In November 1841, Allen became very enthusiastic about a wood-carving invention he believed would make him and any investors a lot of money. Of course, Allen, himself, claimed the UK patent. He bragged to Tennyson, “...we shall have an immense business. All is hope, fear is gone and I feel happy. We are all safe. Orders are flowing in from all the great ones.” And of course, he convinced Tennyson to invest his savings in the invention. However, by 1843, the whole thing had collapsed. Allen wrote, “Every stick and stave is to be sold to pay A.T. this day…and yet people boast! I ail! And I suffer! And I die!” But it was Tennyson who suffered the biggest blow. It was only Allen’s death in 1845 that saved Tennyson from legal pensury, and the amount he received wasn’t that much.

Clare, the nature poet, is presented as a free-thinker, but so is Allen’s seventeen-year-old daughter, Hannah. From the beginning of the book, Hannah’s mind is occupied with three things: men, marriage, and her own future. She waits on the arrival of the Tennyson brothers impatiently, and when they do arrive, she immediately takes a shine to the dark and brooding Alfred. I love this book, but I would have loved it a bit more had Hannah’s doomed relationship with Alfred not occupied so much of the narrative.

And some time is spent on Clare’s involvement with the Gypsies who live in the forest. They aren’t allowed to set up their camp there, so they are very suspicious of Clare, but after he shows them that he means no harm and even convinces them that he is great friends with another Gypsy family, they welcome him with open arms.

The part of the book that concentrates on Allen’s doomed wood-carving machine is interesting as is the character of Hannah, but what I felt most fascinating was Tennyson’s depression over the death of a good friend, Arthur Henry Hallum, at age twenty-two. Hallum was set to marry Tennyson’s sister, and his premature death plunged Tennyson into a deep depression that paralyzed his creative powers and lasted for years. During this time, Tennyson struggled to write an elegy he thought worthy of his friend; however, it took seventeen long years, until 1850, before he was able to produce In Memoriam: A.H.H., a cycle of poems he dedicated to Hallum.

Foulds does an excellent job of folding the story of Allen and his failed wood-carving machine, Hannah’s almost obsessive pursuit of Tennyson, John Clare’s steady, progressive descent into madness, and Tennyson’s grief over the death of his good friend, Arthur Henry Hallum and his inability to write the poem he wants to dedicate to his fallen friend into one seamless narrative. All of the characters are so fully realized and so…well…human, that it’s easy to see that Foulds lavished much love on them, and it’s easy to love them in return. However, as I wrote earlier, I was under the mistaken impression that this would be a book concentrating on Tennyson’s profound grief, and that it is not, but that turned out to be a quibble.

At its core, The Quickening Maze is such a shimmering book, filled with such exquisite prose, I found I was still very happy with it and count it as one of my very favorites. Now, I must add that the bulk of this book takes place in a psychiatric asylum. There are going to be sections that aren’t so shimmeringly beautiful. In the early pages alone, we encounter a graphic description of Dr. Allen giving an enema to a patient who hasn’t voided for three weeks. (Your imagination can fill in how horrible this would be, and to add to that, the patient doesn’t want the enema.) And that’s just the beginning of the ugly side of psychiatric asylums in the 19th century.

The ugly parts of daily asylum life are held to a minimum, though, and the book just soars with detail (a little too much detail for some, I think) and shimmering, poetic prose. It’s exactly the kind of book I love to read and reread.

5/5

Recommended: Only to those who love genuinely literary masterpieces and can tolerate a historical novel, not a book filled with only facts, however it’s very clear that Foulds has done his research and done it well.

Note: I really think this book could have won the 2009 Booker, but it was up against Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, and I don’t think there’s a book in existence that could stand up to that masterpiece. (I realize you might not even like Wolf Hall, and that’s fine. We all have our own ideas about what makes literature great.)

Please visit my author's Website at bellagrimaldi.com

[Mira Margitta · Rating 2 out of 5]

Za ovu knjigu mogu napisati da mi je najdosadnija koju sam pročitala u ovoj godini.Cijelo vrijeme ravna linija,nema zapleta(samim tim ni raspleta).Sve sam čekala da se nešto dogodi i čekajući došla do posljednje stranice.
Zaobići u širokom luku.

[Sandra Deaconu · Rating 1 out of 5]

Realmente, nu am înțeles nimic din cartea asta. Se presupune că este despre niște evenimente reale petrecute într-un soi de sanatoriu, unde metodele de tratare a pacienților erau neortodoxe, să zicem, însă nu m-am prins exact care sunt acele evenimente pentru că totul este o învălmășeală de idei și nici autorul nu a avut decența de a menționa la final care sunt părțile inventate de el.

Trecerea de la trecut la prezent și invers, precum și cea de la un personaj la altul, se face foarte brusc, mult prea repede și nici nu se întoarce la ideea trecută. Acum eram într-o cameră cu două personaje, peste două pagini mă trezeam în pădure cu altele. Acțiunea nu este una concretă, ci doar urmărește ce făceau aia pe acolo. Povestea avea potențial, dar a fost irosit și înlocuit cu un stil foarte obositor, care m-a zăpăcit și m-a făcut să îmi pierd interesul, iar latura psihologică este inexistentă, lucru care mi se pare grav având în vedere subiectul. În afară de câteva scene care descriu cum erau abuzați cei internați acolo, nu mi-a plăcut nimic.

[Jill · Rating 4 out of 5]

Somewhere toward the end of this inventive and imaginative novel, peasant nature poet John Clare muses about "the maze of a life with no way out, paths taken, places been."

In reality -- and much of this book IS based on reality -- each of the characters within these pages will enter into a maze -- figuratively, through the twists and turns of diseased minds, and literally, through the winding paths of the nearby forest. Some will escape unscathed and others will never emerge. But all will be altered.

At the start of the novel, John Clare has been incarcerated in a progressive (for the times) institution called the High Beach Private Asylum. It doesn't take long for the reader to come to the understanding that this seemingly sane poet is not unjustly imprisoned, but is in fact, stark raving mad. Shortly thereafter, John Clare is joined by Septimus Tennyson, the mad brother of the famous Alfred Lord Tennyson, who also takes up residence.

The owner of the asylum -- Matthew Allen -- displays fairness to the inhabitants, yet he has demons of his own. He has escaped a dodgy past as a debtor and has lost the respect of his parsimonious older brother. One of his older daughters, Hannah, is just coming of age and has developed an unrequited crush on Tennyson. Other characters, such as the brutal right-hand man Stockdale and the delusional and fervent Margaret-turned-Mary, drift in and out of the narrative.

Quickening Maze slips slightly when it delves into a subplot about a doomed mass-produce decorative woodcarvings invention, in my opinion. It helps to know that in reality, this happened, and Tennyson lost most of his inherited fortune as a result. After reading Quickening Maze, it is nearly impossible to not go running to check out what parts of this book are based on truths. Yet it does not slip enough for me to deprive the novel of its fifth rating star.

Without spoilers, John Clare will try on various personage from the past, including Lord Byron and Shakespeare himself. Hannah will need to lose her path to find a new one. Matthew Allen will slip on his path and go down one that is far less traveled. And the famous Tennyson? He, too, will forge forward on the path that is his destiny. As Hannah states, "To love the life that was possible: that also was a freedom, perhaps the only freedom."

[John Anthony · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5

I didn't really like this – sorry Adam - but plenty of people did and you were nominated for the Booker. Even so, I'm still probably going to give it 3*s. Why? - the subject: – John Clare's time in an asylum in Essex run by an interesting charlatan and fraudster Matthew Allen, time spent with the poet and depressive Tennyson and his slighty more melancholic brother Septimus. A barrel of laughs as you see..Some wonderful descriptive writing throughout though probably squeezed an extra half star out of me. But John Clare deserved better, surely?

[Ron Charles · Rating 4 out of 5]

While a quartet of literary gladiators battled for the Booker Prize last year, a young poet sat on the far edge of the shortlist looking on. Nobody thought Adam Foulds had a chance against Hilary Mantel, A.S. Byatt, Sarah Waters or J.M. Coetzee for England's most prestigious literary award. The bookies called "The Quickening Maze" a "rank outsider," and almost everyone bet correctly on Mantel's spectacular story about Thomas Cromwell. But while all the other books on the shortlist were published in the United States months ago -- several climbed up our bestseller list in 2009 -- Americans have had to wait more than a year to see the underdog for themselves.

That tardiness seems wholly appropriate for this curious historical novel about a collection of oddballs who stepped to the music of a different drummer. Foulds draws us into Epping Forest in Essex around 1840. In those ancient woods, a progressive doctor named Matthew Allen set up a mental asylum called High Beach. By treating his patients with respect and allowing them a measure of freedom and useful work, he hoped to calm their nerves and return them to the rhythms of normal life.

Early in the novel, for instance, we see Dr. Allen teaching a "lunatic" how to chop wood with an ax. (Don't try this at home.) Violently deranged people were still kept restrained in a separate building -- you'll never forget the emergency enema scene -- but as much as possible, his patients ate and interacted with the doctor's family on a daily basis. Indeed, after a visit to High Beach in 1831, Thomas Carlyle's wife described the asylum as "all overhung with roses and grapes and surrounded by gardens, ponds and shrubberies without the smallest appearance of constraint." It was, she claimed, "a place where any sane person might be delighted to get admission."

Okay, that's just crazy talk, but Dr. Allen's asylum serves as the darkly enchanted setting for "The Quickening Maze." In this graceful blend of history and fiction, Foulds moves through a year-and-a-half when two important poets fell under the influence of the magnetic doctor. The first poet you know, Alfred Tennyson, but it's unlikely you know this weird chapter of his life: Around 1840, depressed by the death of a close friend, Tennyson visited High Beach and formed a disastrous partnership with Dr. Allen.

The other poet is not nearly so famous, but he plays the larger role in this impressionistic novel. John Clare was the son of a farm worker who managed to get a book of his verse published in 1820 when he was 27 years old. He wrote voluminously, and his poetry attracted good reviews, but by the mid-1830s he was desperately poor and schizophrenic, claiming to be Lord Byron and Shakespeare. Friends eventually directed him to High Beach, where he lived for four years of further decline, before making a grueling 80-mile walk with no food back to his home in Northborough.

"The Norton Anthology of English Literature" that I used in college dedicated a scant four pages to Clare's joy-filled peasant poems. But his reputation has risen considerably since then, particularly with the publication in 2003 of Jonathan Bate's celebrated biography and a new collection of his verse. Bate makes the case that "Clare achieved a technical accomplishment, a range of styles and subject, a distinctiveness of voice and visionary power unmatched by anyone of his class before or since." Foulds's novel can't provide the historical depth or breadth of Bate's biography, but its finely tuned sympathy will bring you close to the soul of an exuberant poet.

"The Quickening Maze" covers seven consecutive seasons, a structure that reflects Clare's close attention to the natural world. Disparate lines of the plot run through strange, loosely connected moments. We see the patients consumed with their own manias, such as Margaret, an anorexic preserving her body for Christ, or George, who believes he's solely responsible for the ever-growing national debt. (Where is George when we need him?) These are difficult characters because they're so easy to play for laughs or sentimentality, but Foulds conveys the profound loneliness of mental illness, the anxiety of being at least partially aware of one's own peculiarity.

That's particularly true with poor John Clare, who craves literary respect in London and wild freedom in the woods, but neither is possible as he's increasingly ignored by publishers and restrained by doctors. The novel's most moving scenes show him wandering around Epping Forest, falling in with a band of Gypsies whose nomadic life is equally endangered by the industrial forces transforming England. "It was common land a few months back," a Gypsy woman tells him, "and what grew and bred on it was common as God's air. Now it's the railway's and the boys are gaoled. And you could only tell it from signs they couldn't read, not having the art." His only real happiness comes during boisterous episodes of madness when his stomach is full of roasted hedgehog and he challenges men to boxing matches he can't win.

The success of this story rests entirely on Foulds's voice, which perfectly captures Clare's mind. Listen as he describes the poet spending a night with his Gypsy friends: "He loved lying in its lap, the continuing forest, the way the roots ate the rot of leaves, and it circled on. To please himself, to decorate his path into sleep, he passed through his mind an inventory of its creatures."

Another story line, far lighter and more comic, follows Dr. Allen's teenage daughter as she tries to woo Tennyson while he's "sinking into the grief that will make him famous." Nearsighted, smelly, deeply depressed, he's a bizarre object of affection for a romantic young woman, but the pickings are pretty slim in an asylum, and teenage crushes are a kind of insanity anyhow. In fact, by the end, everybody seems to be staking out a spot on the spectrum of mental illness. What species of madness leads Dr. Allen to imagine he could make a killing with a wood-carving machine? And why does Tennyson sink his entire savings into the doctor's ridiculous scheme? These are not questions the novel can answer, but like the mystery of John Clare's wondering spirit, they're all portrayed here with arresting beauty.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/...

[Jon · Rating 5 out of 5]

A library book which I will buy and re-read with pleasure. Told in a series of vignettes, some only a paragraph or two long, others virtual short stories, spaced over a period of less than two years. We are introduced early to the main characters--the Allen family (father, mother, three daughters and son) who run an asylum for the insane in mid nineteenth century England. Their patients include the neglected nature poet John Clare, a visionary mystic named Margaret, and Septimus Tennyson, the brother of the not-yet famous poet Alfred. I suppose the main character is John Clare, whose eager and increasingly desperate wanderings open the book (in a flashback to his boyhood) and end it, as he returns (briefly, we are told) home to his wife. This is the only book I've ever read in which descriptions of what it feels like to be mad did not become frustrating and boring. Foulds writes with absolute precision and economy, not a word out of place, and every phrase perfection. Dr. Matthew Allen, the father and head of the asylum, longs to do great things both in medicine and commerce; but his ambitions outrun his abilities, and he bankrupts his own family and ruins the Tennysons, who invest in his schemes. My favorite part of the book involved Hannah Allen, the 17 year old daughter who has decided to be in love with Alfred Tennyson even before meeting him. Her excited hope and anticipation are always met with his indifference and preoccupation with other things, but for a long time she fails to notice. The best moment of the book (for me) came when another suitor proposed to her, and for the first time, she empathized with someone else--she suddenly realized that he had imagined the scene of his proposal just as she had imagined almost every aspect of her supposed future. Before our eyes she stops being a selfish teenager and becomes an adult. A wonderful scene. Many Goodreads reviewers have wondered about the book's title and referred to a line about John Clare feeling trapped in a maze with no exit. But the title is about a quickening maze, one that is coming alive. I'm sure it's a reference to section 115 in Tennyson's In Memoriam:
Now fades the last long streak of snow,
Now burgeons every maze of quick
About the flowering squares, and thick
By ashen roots the violets blow.

It comes towards the end of the poem, when Tennyson is finally growing hopeful for a fresher and better life after mourning for so, so long the death of his friend. The title of the book seems to me to be similarly hopeful. In spite of its serious subjects, it is a lovely and optimistic book.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Adam Foulds possesses a very fine writing style, and that is the high point of this book. The plot and subplots are also engaging, and the sundry characters, based on real people, are winning. The story centers on John Clare, the earthy English “peasant poet,” and his stay at an insane asylum run by Matthew Allen, a doctor/industrialist. Allen’s daughter Hannah is also a character we spend time with, as is the poet Alfred Tennyson, who resides near the asylum to be near his brother Septimus, a melancholic who is a patient there.

What interested me most in the book, besides the writing, was the intermingling of the mad and the sane. John Clare, the deluded and suffering Margaret, Septimus, the poor man who thinks he’s responsible for the national debt, and others wander in and out of the scenes and you can’t help but realize they are just slight mutations of the rest of us. For the most part, there’s something tender in the mad trafficking with the normal world, and Matthew Allen seems a noble doctor. (Unfortunately he craves wider recognition, and that is his downfall.) As an example of the give-and-take between worlds, here’s a scene from the start of the book where Allen’s small daughter encounters some patients as she skips home:

"…there was Margaret sitting on a stool, sewing. She liked Margaret, her thin, sharp-chinned face like a wooden toy, and wide, clear, kind eyes. She was a peaceful lady, mostly, and now Abigail walked over and leaned against her knees to be for a moment within that calm."

John Clare makes an especially sympathetic character. He is one messed-up guy. Sometimes he thinks he’s Byron, sometimes Shakespeare and sometimes a boxer, or the Boxer Byron together, but at the same time John Clare, too, the poet who believes he has two wives. Even with all that confusion, sometimes he has moments of lucidity, or at least approaches to it. One rattling incident occurs when he witnesses an inmate being abused. Although he’s not terribly clear who the inmate is, his brain collects itself to realize what is happening, and his conviction that it is wrong was one of the most moving scenes in the book. It is the scene, I think, that really sets the book rolling. (page 202!)

The end of the book echoes the beginning, with John Clare looking for his path home and finding it, all brilliantly written. If you are a reader who needs non-stop action I would warn you off this novel, but for those who like delicate, evocative prose it is worth it.

[Hally · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is all about the writing style, so beautiful it draws you in straight away. My favourite passages include;

Our introduction to the mentally ill poet John Clare, the most poignantly presented character in the book;

He lifted the blanket, swung his softening white feet onto the clean wood floor, and stood up, and immediately wanted to lie back down again and not lie back down again and go and not go anywhere and not be there and be home.

The completeness of this metaphor...

Matthew Allen's powers of immersion were prodigious. Like a sea mammal, he disappeared down into his new element for hours. He surfaced, was loud and cheerful and hungry, and then vanished again.

This passage reminded me slightly of my babe Tess's (of the D'urbevilles) existential musings;

Hannah was suddenly, surprisingly, angered by this. She didn't like the thought of people out there moving independently, meeting and having conversations she would never hear, not thinking of her. It killed her, made a ghost of her.

All in all a beautiful quick read that demonstrated to me how to perfectly inhabit many different characters' point of view.

UPDATE:
I was lucky enough to attend a writing seminar with Adam Foulds today, and he articulated some more things I loved about this book in a way I didn't. He said that ''although The Quickening Maze is a historical novel, it doesn't fetishize it's pastness'', which I agree with and which explains why I loved it so much despite historical fiction not being my usual genre of choice. Despite being set in 1840, it feels in some way as though it is happening today.

[Harvey · Rating 3 out of 5]

My English tutor recommended this book to me. What surprised me is the protagonist of this book is actually a real poet whose poetry I have read earlier and enjoyed very much. His name is John Clare, a talented poet and become lunatic in his later life.
I would appreciate this book more if it was written as a nonfiction.

[Jane · Rating 3 out of 5]

“He’d been sent out to pick firewood from the forest, sticks and timbers wrenched loose in the storm. Light met him as he stepped outside, the living day met him with its details, the scuffling blackbird that had its nest in their apple tree.

Walking towards the woods, the heath, beckoning away. Undulations of yellow gorse rasped softly in the breeze. It stretched off onto unknown solitudes.

He was a village boy and he knew certain things, He thought that the edge of the world was a day’s walk away, there where the cloud-breeding sky touched the earth at the horizon. He thought that when he got there he would find a deep pit and he would be able to look down into it and the world’s secrets.”

Lot of things drew me towards The Quickening Maze: an intriguing concept, a striking cover, and it was shortlisted for last year’s Booker prize. But it was those lovely opening paragraphs that drew me in. I never could resist a well written passage about man and nature.

The child who stepped out into the wood grew up to be the poet John Clare. I didn’t know his work, but I am very pleased that this novel has steered me towards it. Life in the Epping Forest with his wife and their six children became a struggle. He suffered bouts of severe depression, his behaviour became increasingly erratic and he had serious delusions. Eventually he is admitted to the High Beech Asylum.

Dr Matthew Allen runs the asylum in an extraordinarily humane and compassionate way. He treats his patient well, talking to them trying to understand and help. It’s a refreshing change from the usual portrayal of Victorian institutions. Patients are allowed a relative freedom, but it is a freedom that Clare abuses. And his forays do not bring him peace, but his mental health deteriorates still further. It’s a vividly portrayed and heartbreaking story.

And Dr Allen has problems of his own. The asylum’s finances are in a poor state, His efforts to put things onto a firmer footing and advance his work are radical. They may work, but there is a very real risk that they may not.

Meanwhile a very different poet, Alfred Tennyson, accompanies his mentally-ill brother during his stay at High Beech. And he draws the attention of Dr Allen’s 17 year-old daughter Hannah who determines to win his heart.

I know nothing of the real stories that Adam Foulds has built his fiction upon, but nothing jars. Clare and Tennyson do not meet – that might have stretched credulity – they simply pass through the same place.

All of these stories unfold in lovely, sparse prose, moving with the changing seasons. There is much to praise, many wonderful details, lovely descriptions of nature, and yet this book didn’t quite reach the heights I had hoped for.

The trouble I think was this: the multiple storylines and the sparse writing didn’t offer anything to hold on to. And all of the movement between characters held up any forward momentum. No one element was wrong, but the way that they came together didn’t quite work.

And so I found a good book where I had hoped for, where there was the potential for, a great one.

[Vanessa Wu · Rating 3 out of 5]

Adam Foulds is a terrific writer. I read an article by him on how to write description and it was so brilliant that I immediately bought this novel.

I'm not going to share the article with you because if you read it you will instantly be able to write brilliant descriptions in your novels and that would give me too much competition while my own career is floundering.

Oh, all right, then. You've twisted my arm. You're right. Novel writing shouldn't be competitive. We should all help each other to be brilliant.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/...

This article shows that Adam Foulds is very good at appreciating other novelists. But how good is he at writing a novel himself?

I have some reservations about that. The descriptive passages in The Quickening Maze are vivid and beautiful. The story unfolds in a series of intense vignettes.

It's a poignant story, deeply imagined, and rendered in accurate detail.

But I sensed a lot of fear in the way it was written. The author, rather like the character who had to be tied down and given an enema, was afraid to evacuate.

Ironically, this section, when Mr Francombe is given a clyster and “wept with disappointment as an astonishing quantity of shit bloomed from him across the table,” was one of the most fluent, engaging and sustained pieces of narrative in the whole novel. I forgot for a moment that I was reading the work of a poet.

The theme of clenching occurs later. The doctor himself, Matthew Allen, is guilty of it.

“When Matthew Allen had the idea he stood up out of his chair. ... His body clenched with excitement, as though gripping the thought inside him so as not to lose it.”

I think the author is also clenching. Come on, Adam! Loosen up! Don't be afraid of showing us your shit. This approach might improve the erotic passages which, though not bad, are terribly restrained and far from arousing.

[Eric · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Booker Prize 2009 disappointed me with its runaway winner, but per my goodreads star allocations, The Quickening Maze ran circles around Wolf Hall...and in doing so took much less time.

Here is a fragile treatment of Matthew Allen's "insane asylum" during a rough time period when John Clare and a far more widely hailed Alfred Tennyson were both on site, the latter to stay near his troubled brother and not because he was admitted as insane or disturbed himself. It should also be noted that Clare and Tennyson do not interact in this novel.

It's a rare storyteller who can identify some of the more disturbing elements of mental conditions and there are a handful of scenes where Adam Foulds hits that point. He should be commended for not taking too much of the story to identify this weakness (see Samantha Harvey's The Wilderness for that kind of book). For the most part, Maze is told in a very close third person that roves between characters. Clare's shifting personalities are a good enough indication of what it must have been like to be "imprisoned" under doctor's orders. His last hurrah, however, suggests that even the lowly conditions of Allen's institution were not the worst option for a patient with proven mental illness.

[Sharon Bakar · Rating 5 out of 5]

I met Adam Foulds recently at an arts festival in Kuala Lumpur and was lucky enough to do a workshop with him on creating character. I felt a bit ashamed of myself that I hadn't read this book already (especially as I usually read the Booker shortlist, especially as he agreed to read at the event I organised).

I thoroughly enjoyed this novel - the writing was gorgeous, particularly rich in details of the natural world, and had me wanting to reread passages. He has recreated a small slice of history around High Beach Asylum in Epping Forest, run by Dr Malcolm Allen. The poet John Clare is incarcerated there, and Alfred Tennyson is renting a cottage close by since his brother Septimus is also a patient. I had never given much thought to the men behind the poetry, but Foulds opened a window for me into their lives and I found myself wanting to read beyond his novel to find out more about them. (Honestly, did Tennyson smell?)

Foulds has so much sympathy for his characters and does so well depicting their inner lives, including the workings of madness. The narrative, which weaves together the stories of several characters is very well handled.

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Madness is always an interesting read.

This novel is focused on a portion of the life of the "rural" poet, John Clare that was spent in an asylum in Essex in 1830s. John Clare, from humble beginnings, had some success with his early work. However, when the novelty had worn off, this immensely gifted writer experienced isolation and hardship, and finally became insane, spending some of his life in Dr. Matthew Allen's High Beach private asylum.

Alfred Lord Tennyson's brother was institutionalize there too and the young Tennyson stayed near by to lend support to his brother. Tennyson becomes the object of Matthew Allen's teenage daughter's interest and fantasy adding another layer of characters to this novel. Adam Foulds' blend of true and invented characters and their inner life masterfully illustrates the general life of the asylum, the lives of the patients and the lives of those helping them.

A shortlisted Booker novel, The Quickening Maze "illuminates the issues of our own era" says author Adam Foulds and I have to agree.

[Derek · Rating 5 out of 5]

How do you even review a book like this. This 'poetic novel' totally defies any literary style I've ever read, and that's saying something. There is such poise and keenness in pace, driving us through the book's metamorphic soaring of the characters, versus themselves, versus a compelling setting, that the build-up and eventual pay-off left me totally satisfied. I'll be the first to admit it, even after finishing this book, I still don't know what it was supposed to be about, there's no visible plot, but the well-rounded characters and the brilliant writing( which is exceptional to say the least, it reads like a lucid-dream) make up for the lack of plot. But who needs plot anyway? Right?
This is the first Adam Foulds I've read, it definitely won't be my last.

[Hypatia · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was OK. The book itself was very well written, and the use of language was excellent. Some of the descriptions were very poetic (no surprise there really). The story itself left me cold though. The "main character" (according to the book's description) wasn't in most of the story at all. Nothing really happened, although I kept thinking the book was building to some big climax. I was left just thinking what's the point?

[Camilla Zahn · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've found confusing the amount of characters and the back and forth between them, and kinda hoped something bigger to happened. BUT, it is still a very good book, the descriptions of the forest and the seasons changing is remarkable. It has nice quotes and it made me think about the point of what is truly freedom, which I think is one of the main points of the book.

[Ruth · Rating 2 out of 5]

I went into this book expecting an exploration of the mind of John Clare, and I didn't get it. Instead I got bits and pieces of a lot of other people, too, none of them explored in depth, either. This might have been a much better book if it was a series of linked and overlapping short stories.