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The Quickening Maze

3.11 of 5 stars 3.11 · rating details · 974 ratings · 206 reviews

Based on real events in Epping Forest on the edge of London around 1840, The Quickening Maze centres on the first incarceration of the great nature poet John Clare. After years struggling with alcohol, critical neglect and depression, Clare finds himself in High Beach Private Asylum - an institution run on reformist principles which would later become known as occupational...more

Hardcover, 272 pages

Published May 7th 2009 by Jonathan Cape (first published 2009)

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Mar 13, 2012 ·Karen· rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: brits

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...more

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Mar 11, 2011 Sue rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: historical-fiction, read-in-2011, literary-fiction, library-book

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 characte...more

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Jun 28, 2010 Lilian rated it 5 of 5 stars

When I began this book, I sighed with pleasure, because I knew, in the first few pages, that I was in the hands of a writer who knew what he was doing. I could feel the competence, the control of language, structure and story from the start and it never flagged.

The Quickening Maze is a novel about the people associated with a private insane asylum in 1840’s England: Dr. Matthew Allen, the director of the asylum, Hannah, his teenage daughter, the famous nature poet John Clare, who is an inmate,...more

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May 27, 2010 Jill rated it 4 of 5 stars

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 alt...more 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." (less)

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Apr 29, 2013 Richard Newton rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

I am glad I was given this novel this Christmas. It is a real joy that I would otherwise have missed. The joy comes, if from nothing else, from the way Foulds uses language and his observational skills. He has great an ability to build a picture with one or two precise details described with a beautifully light touch. The book flows as a good novel should.

However, this is not a flawless novel. The story requires some concentration, at least at first. But as the prose is so magnificent it is easy...more

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Jan 27, 2013 Laura rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. I hadn´t read a contemporary novel in a while and I approached this one with excitement. The feeling was enhanced by recently watching the BBC history series "Regency: Elegance and Decadence" and being able to see there John Clare´s family cottage and tomb -typically, not on the side of the church graveyard where he wished it would have been-.
This is a sad, bleak story, told in a highly poetic and symbolic style but with -I feel- a lazy structure. If I had only a little time to write a novel, if...more

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Aug 27, 2012 NyiNya rated it 5 of 5 stars

Poetry, madness, lost love and nature are part of the maze Adam Foulds constructs in this gentle but almost overwhelmingly layered book. He lures us deeper and deeper into its convoluted twists and turns with a quiet, almost hypnotic prose. Foulds' use of sotto voce is very effective.

The book is based on real events. Nature poet John Clare is a resident at High Beach Asylum in the Essex countryside. The Asylum is run by Dr. Matthew Allen who lives there with his own family. A frequent visitor is...more Poetry, madness, lost love and nature are part of the maze Adam Foulds constructs in this gentle but almost overwhelmingly layered book. He lures us deeper and deeper into its convoluted twists and turns with a quiet, almost hypnotic prose. Foulds' use of sotto voce is very effective.

The book is based on real events. Nature poet John Clare is a resident at High Beach Asylum in the Essex countryside. The Asylum is run by Dr. Matthew Allen who lives there with his own family. A frequent visitor is the poet Alfred Tennyson, whose brother is a patient.

The book gives us a rare glimpse at one of the most lyrical and obscure of the 19th Century's nature poets. Clare was hardly typical of the gentleman poets of the day. He was the son of a laborer, worked in the fields with his parents from the time he could walk, and had just a few years of schooling. When he was 12 he left school, worked as a potboy at a local tavern, a gardener for the local squire, and as a laborer and menial in a variety of unskilled and poorly paying jobs. He fell in love with a young woman whose father didn't think much of Clare's poetry or prospects and opposed the match. To escape his heartache, Clare enlisted in the militia, and later joined a band of gypsies.

Recently Clare's poetry has been rediscovered and he's been called "The greatest labouring-class poet that England ever produced." Certainly his work justifies the accolade, but exactly how many labouring-class poets did England churn out in that period? Poets rarely are in it for the money and Clare had no family fortune to fall back on. Although at one time his poems were more popular than those of John Keats, he never made a living from his writing.

After being thwarted in his first love, Clare meets and marries another young woman, but the union is a troubled one. Financial pressures and being a freak of sorts -- imagine being known as "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" -- all took their toll on Clare's mental state. As his grip on reality loosens, he begins to think he's the poet Byron, hallucinates about his lost Mary, and sometimes, despite his 5' stature and childlike physique, believes he is a famous boxer. By way of variety, he occasionally claims to be Shakespeare as well. His wife has him committed to Dr. Allen's facility.

High Beach is no snake pit; it offers genuine asylum to the lost souls it harbors, and Dr. Allen is a proponant of what would have been the latest and most humane treatments. Although Jon Clare is essential to the narrative, the book is not just about him. It is very much the story of High Beach and those who dwell within its gates. It's about Dr. Allen and his family, and Allen's pressing need for money. It's about love, lust and betryal, hare-brained entrepreneurial attempts, a budding romance between Tennyson and Allen's daughter, the other patients at High Beach, bad doctors, and scheming businessmen. More gypsies enter the picture. There is a lot going on inside the walls and on the grounds of the asylum. And it's all fascinating if somewhat overstuffed. The stories parallel one another, bounce off of one another, ramble here and there at will. The book seems to offer asylum to any number of plot lines and story threads. They come together -- just barely -- and manage to keep sufficiently connected so that there is some sense of narrative momentum.

What saves the book from chaos is Foulds' ability to be linear, and his quiet, disarming style. We go from point A to point B; each anecdote, each event has a beginning, middle and end. We finish one before proceeding to the next. Reading two books like this would be exhausting. Readng just this one is exhilerating.

For a compelling look at psychiatry in the 19th century and for a rare glimpse at a poet whose work deserves more recognition, and for giving us a something perplexing, delightful, unique and occasionally frustrating, five stars. (less)

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Nov 24, 2011 Mary Ellen rated it 4 of 5 stars

I was undecided as to three or four stars on this one. It is very well written; in particular, the author is able to write in very varied, individual voices: persons suffering from various delusions; a rather manic inventor/scientist with ethical issues; a self-involved not-yet-great poet; a teenaged girl seeking escape from her difficult and dull situation through marriage; a child simultaneously ignored and spoiled by her parents; an enraged minor nobleman... The narrative shifts from one pers...more

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Oct 31, 2011 Vanessa Wu rated it 3 of 5 stars

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 b...more

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Jul 05, 2011 Tony rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction-mainstream

Foulds, Adam. THE QUICKENING MAZE. (2009). ****.
I haven’t come across this English writer before, but the banner on the front of this book told me that it had been a finalist for the Man Booker Prize. That’s enough for me to give it a try. It’s an historical novel about a short period in the life of Tennyson when he has taken his brother to a lunatic asylum on the edge of London. He then takes up residence in a cottage near the institution to be near him. Tennyson himself has his own problems,...more

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Mar 19, 2011 Vivian Valvano rated it 4 of 5 stars

The history is supposed to be accurate. It surely does read as "stranger than fiction." But this is an extremely well written novel about the stay of the unfortunate alcoholic and deeply mentall disturbed nature poet John Clare in an asylum run by the incompetent, unethical, perhaps even mad, "Dr." Matthew Allen. Pity the poor mentally ill of the time; pity them greatly. Another principal character is Alfred Tennyson who moves near the asylum to be near his brother, another of the unlucky ones u...more

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Mar 17, 2011 Jon rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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 br...more 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.(less)

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Snorri Sturluson Oh, you scholar you. Just the other day, as I began again to read my two-year-old Christmas gift, a biography of local boy Longfellow, the phrase, "....more
Mar 18, 2011 09:27am

Jon Yeah, well, easy for YOU to say. Actually I have no doubt that the title means (in part) exactly what you say, and I would have gone into it as you di...more
Mar 18, 2011 10:08am

Snorri Sturluson I'd confirm that, but since Elinor moved in, the OED is buried under a stack of other books, the path to that shelf is blocked by various chattels loo...more
Mar 18, 2011 10:18am

Jan 13, 2011 TheGirlBytheSeaofCortez rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: based-on-real-events, booker-nominees-and-winners, contemporary-authors, favorites, literary-fiction

Beginning in the late 1830s, and set over seven seasons, Adam Foulds’ Booker shortlisted novel, The Quickening Maze tells the intertwined stories of the “Northamptonshire poet,” John Clare, the son of a farmer; Alfred Tennyson, the man who would go on to become Britain’s Poet Laureate; and the Reverend Matthew Allen, MD, the man who owned High Beach Private Asylum in Essex’s Epping Forest, where both Clare and Tennyson’s brother, Septimus, were patients.

Although Clare’s nature poetry was acclaim...more

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Sep 27, 2010 Teresa rated it 4 of 5 stars

This account of the madness of the English poet John Clare captured my affections almost immediately. Foulds weaves Clare� s story with those of the sanitarium director, Dr. Matthew Allen, and his family, as well as those of various patients in the sanitarium and Alfred Tennyson, whose brother becomes a patient. Foulds takes us inside the characters� minds, letting us see the sometimes flawed logic behind the things they do.[return][return]Because the novel takes place in a sanitarium, we see th...more

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Sep 26, 2010 Cameling rated it 3 of 5 stars

Historical fiction of nature poet, John Clare's gradual descent into madness while staying in High Beach, a mental institution in England. While he's there, he also comes into contact with Alfred Tennyson. Although Tennyson was not another patient, he was prone to moments of melancholy. Tennyson's brother, Septimus Tennyson, was a patient at the same mental institution, run by Matthew Allen.

Through the multiple characters gracing this book, from Hannah, Matthew's daughter who fancies herself in...more

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Sep 24, 2010 Vernon Goddard rated it 2 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Nobody

Shelves: no-no-books

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...more

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Aug 28, 2010 Judith rated it 5 of 5 stars

In a relatively short book Foulds convincingly and with great sensitivity explores the fragile separation between creativity and madness. Incorporating known history, biography, and actual writings of his subjects, Foulds in his characters gives us a spectrum of "mad" and "normal" clustered around the asylum where John Clare, Tennyson, and other historical personages found themselves in the late 19th century. The main points on the spectrum are defined by degress of obsession: a young man is for...more

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Aug 09, 2010 Barb rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: hf-victorian-1837-1901, mental-health, new-in-2010, read-in-2010, vine

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...more

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Jul 27, 2010 Eric rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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 Cla...more

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Mar 23, 2010 Jane rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: borrowed

“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 aw...more

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Jan 21, 2013 Bryn Hammond rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: novelists

p. 88, without incentive to go on.
I came for Tennyson, whose anxieties about mental illness I read about in a wonderful biography, Tennyson, The Unquiet Heart: that has much on insanity in his family, treatments, asylums -- so I knew about his semi-commitment of himself. Also, I was pierced by certain 19thC poems from sufferers of insanity. I only knew a single John Clare poem, though.

After a few pages of Tennyson -- it's a short book, if it hasn't happened a third in -- I strongly suspect thi...more

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Jun 02, 2010 Eileen Granfors rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: families, highly-unusual, historical-fiction, medical-issues, women

Adam Foulds is a poet. His first novel, "The Quickening Maze," reminds me of works by Virginia Woolf or William Faulkner--seriously intellectual and hard work to read.

The main thread of the plot concerns poet John Clare as his rage and drinking lands him in an insane asylum. While John is there, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, accompanies his brother, Septimus, to be treated for "the English disease," melancholia (depression). Clare and Tennyson, who capture our interest because of their historical impac...more

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Aug 21, 2010 Elizabeth rated it 4 of 5 stars

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 th

...more

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Aug 17, 2010 Charles Dee Mitchell rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: contemporary-lit

I had requested this from the library before they owned a copy. By the time it came in I had forgotten both why I had wanted it and what it was going to be about. So I decided to just start reading.

In what seems at first a small, genteel, 19 century mental institution, the family that runs it eagerly awaits the arrival of their new "star" patient, the melancholic brother of Alfred Tennyson. As a plus, Alfred himself will be staying nearby. The other somewhat well known patient is John Clare, sl...more

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May 13, 2011 Heather rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, historical-fiction, library-books

In the June 28, 2010 issue of the New Yorker, James Wood started a review of this book by calling it "richly sown with beauty," then going on to call Foulds's novel "a remarkable work, remarkable for the precision and vitality of its perceptions and for the successful intricacy of its prose." High praise, and I think The Quickening Maze lives up to it. It's the story of the poet John Clare, mad, stuck in an asylum on the edge of Epping Forest, where sometimes he's lucid and sometimes not. It's a...more In the June 28, 2010 issue of the New Yorker, James Wood started a review of this book by calling it "richly sown with beauty," then going on to call Foulds's novel "a remarkable work, remarkable for the precision and vitality of its perceptions and for the successful intricacy of its prose." High praise, and I think The Quickening Maze lives up to it. It's the story of the poet John Clare, mad, stuck in an asylum on the edge of Epping Forest, where sometimes he's lucid and sometimes not. It's also a story about the life of the asylum more generally: Dr Matthew Allen, who runs the place, and his family, and the other patients and the whole circle of nearby life: Alfred Tennyson, who moves into the neighborhood because his brother is a patient, the gypsies who camp in the forest, the local man who owns a factory producing machine parts from hornbeam wood. There is much that is harsh in this book: abuses and horrors in the madhouse, the frustration that Clare feels at being kept captive, Matthew Allen's financial woes and his anxieties about having been in debtor's prison in his youth. But there is also much that is lovely, particularly the descriptions of the natural world, the forest that's the maze at the heart of the novel and at the heart of those who live around it. The forest as a presence keeps appearing: an asylum patient who has visions of God's love and angelic deliverance feels "the darkness in the heart of the wood" as coming between her and God (21), and Allen and Tennyson talk about the forest as a sign of the flow of energy of the world, a "unitary force" that Allen sees behind all phenomena: "The forest died into itself, growing, shapes fading, eaten, lengthening anew," and so goes the world, too (25). And the doctor and Tennyson aren't the only ones who know this: so does Clare: "He loved lying in its lap, the continuing forest, the way the roots ate the rot of leaves, and it circled on" (51).

But the forest isn't just discussed in these big-picture abstract or symbolic terms: it's also there quite literally and concretely. Clare knows the natural world and the forest is part of what he knows: when he's allowed out of the asylum grounds for the days, he enters the forest and goes "past the familiar forms of the nearby trees, out to the strangers that grew hidden for miles around" (41). He notices things in the forest: "the loosely matted leaves, the prickly star-shapes of beech-nut shells, and the roots that ribbed the path" (42). He sees holly bushes and brambles, a blackberry, a blackbird; he sees a rotting tree-trunk and the fungus consuming it, the shards of snail shells smashed by a thrush. (Another patient sees the details of the forest too, and builds a mandala of sorts out of insect wings and feathers and stones and leaves.) Best of all for me: this great list-paragraph, below, in which Clare thinks of the forest's many inhabitants:

To please himself, to decorate his path into sleep, he passed through his mind an inventory of its creatures. He saw the trees, beech, oak, hornbeam, lime, holly, hazel, and the berries, the different mushrooms, ferns, moss, lichens. He saw the rapid, low foxes, the tremulous deer, lone wild cats, tough, trundling badgers, the different mice, the bats, the day animals and night animals. He saw the snails, the frogs, the moths that looked like bark and the large, ghost-winged moths, the butterflies: orange tips, whites, fritillaries, the ragged-winged commas. He recounted the bees, the wasps. He thought of all the birds, the drumming woodpeckers and laughing green woodpeckers, the stripe of the nuthatch, the hook-faced sparrowhawks, the blackbirds and the tree creeper flinching up the trunks of trees. He saw the blue tits flicking between branches, the white flash of the jay's rump as it flew away, the pigeons sitting calmly separate, together in a tree. He saw the fierce, sweet-voiced robin. He saw the sparrows. (51-52)

(less)

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Oct 13, 2012 Helen rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I enjoyed this. It's one of those books where nothing much happens, but everything happens. There are no obvious heroes or villains, it's stocked with people doing what people do, some of them are nicer than others, but they're all just human. Set in an asylum where John Clare, the rural poet, is locked up due to his mental instability. For someone used to walking in the open to see the far horizon, this is torture of the worst kind. It also feature his fellow inmates, the asylum's owner and fam...more

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May 12, 2012 Geraldine Moorkens Byrne rated it 1 of 5 stars

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 st...more

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Dec 02, 2011 Texbritreader rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: english-lit, literary-fiction, novel

In this excellent novel recounting the madness of poet John Clare and his stay at the progressive asylum of Dr Matthew Allen; we meet a host of others, the isolated family of Dr. Allen, assorted inmates with a variety of troubles and the poet Alfred Tennyson and his brother, the melancholic Septimus. Though fictionalized the author tells their stories deftly and with deep insight, creating fully realized characters without betraying the actual people on which they are based.

The story evolves gen...more

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Jul 16, 2010 Tony rated it 5 of 5 stars

Foulds constructs a historical fiction in which characters explore existential possibilities that open and close, trying to break out of the maze that confines them -'the maze of life with no way out, paths taken, places been'. Asylum inmates John Clare and Margaret move in and out of madness, struggling with inner torments and worldly constraints. Mathew Allen, Asylum owner, is drawn by a propensity to gamble into investing his own and other's money in new technology, leading to his economic an...more

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Nov 16, 2009 Leon rated it 5 of 5 stars

Adam Foulds’s first book of fiction The Truth About These Strange Times garnered very favorable reviews, and won the Betty Trask Award 2007. This second one, The Quickening Maze is just as successful, even more so when it got shortlisted for the Booker.

It is a historical fiction, just like his other shortlisted Booker candidate Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall. But, unlike it, it is shorter, about a quarter of the length. But, like that booker winner again, the writing is exquisite. Just look at these...more Adam Foulds’s first book of fiction The Truth About These Strange Times garnered very favorable reviews, and won the Betty Trask Award 2007. This second one, The Quickening Maze is just as successful, even more so when it got shortlisted for the Booker.

It is a historical fiction, just like his other shortlisted Booker candidate Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall. But, unlike it, it is shorter, about a quarter of the length. But, like that booker winner again, the writing is exquisite. Just look at these two examples:

Small birds, tit mice … flew off together in a pretty wave of magic.

The thick leaves purred and bounced under sparkling strings of water

They could just fit right into a poem. Which is not unusual, because first and foremost Foulds is a poet, and a prize-winning one, at that. He won the 2009 Costa poetry award for The Broken Word, a narrative about the Mau Mau uprising, in poems.

Again, another comparison with Wolf Hall: his sentences are just as short and pithy. It is as if these two writers have modernized the historical written style while making it relevant to the feel and the mood of those periods. While Wolf Hall’s period is way older, Foulds’s is the 19th century. However, do not presume that this is Fould’s written style. If you read his other book, you’d find the style there quite different, very modern and contemporary.

The story of The Quickening Maze concerns mainly the famous John Clare, a pastoral poet. He is kept in a mental hospital High Beach run by one Matthew Allen. We also meet another famous poet Alfred Tennyson, on whom the doctor’s teenage daughter Hannah has set her sights. Unfortunately, he is short-sighted and vain enough to not wear glasses. He is in - or near - the asylum because of his brother Septimus, the true patient.

As an institution, High Beach can be deemed quite opened or lax - John is able to venture out into the nearby woods. There he happily consorts with the gypsies, who poach the forest’s game. Only when he returns looking the worse for wear after a boxing match that the rules are tightened and he is locked up, for his own safety. Throughout the book we are shown instances of Clare’s worsening mental state: he sometimes thinks he’s Byron, or even Shakespeare, or a boxer Jack Randall.

At times when the story leaves Clare, we see what else is going on in the institution. The doctor Matthew has ideas for a machine that can carve wooden patterns. He solicits capital from Tennyson, who foolishly agrees to contribute. When things sour, the family has to sell of the furniture and other belongings, to pay for debts.

We also see another ugly side of the place. One of the keepers abuses the patients, taking sexual advantage of a female who thinks she is Mary of the Bible. Clare discovers him one day, and threatens to expose him to the doctor, but he is beaten for this. In the end, John is rid of the place when he takes a final outing into the forest with an intent to walk all the way back home, up into north, to his wife, and to Mary, whom he believes is still alive.

This is a very well-written book, with a good pacing of the various stories, of John Clare, Hannah, Tennyson, and the doctor. Definitely re-readable, if only to savour again the poetic feel of the writing.(less)

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About Adam Foulds

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 con...more 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(less)

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