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The Quickening Maze

Adam Foulds

3.14 · Rating details · 2,388 ratings · 347 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

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Hardcover, 261 pages

Published May 7th 2009 by Jonathan Cape

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Jun 19, 2013 Vit Babenco rated it really liked it

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 mig

...more

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Sep 30, 2018 Bionic Jean rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: read-authors-e-h, auto-and-biography

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 ...more

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Jun 06, 2010 ·Karen· rated it it was amazing · 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 14, 2020 Roger Brunyate rated it really liked it

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. 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. ...more

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Sep 24, 2011 Talal Faisal rated it really liked it

Read it? I translated this book to arabic, means, I kept doing nothing for 4 months apart from reading this wonderful and fine wriiten novel.
Thanks Adam Foulds

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May 06, 2012 Geraldine Byrne rated it did not like it

Shelves: booker

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 s ...more

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Jan 13, 2011 Sue rated it really liked it · review of another edition

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

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 Nattel rated it it was amazing

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, 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, and Alfred Tennyson before he became Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Poet Laureate, whose brother is being treated there, too, as well as Margaret who fled domestic violence and found her escape in ecstatic religion.

Based on historical events, the novel begins in a peaceful setting, Epping Forest, where the doctor’s progressive ideas about the treatment of the mentally ill are helping John Clare, a depressed poet who came from a peasant background. Belonging nowhere, he was briefly lauded and then out of fashion, when allowed to leave the grounds, hanging out with Roma (Gypsies) in the forest.

But the doctor’s intelligence and unflagging energy find a new target, fueled by the Victorian dreams of industry. Investing in a new invention with visions of getting rich, he abandons the asylum to abusive underlings, inveigling the Tennysons into his scheme.

The story kept me rapt, the writing evocative:

"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 paced back and forth, a strange, soft, curving walk that was almost like dancing. It reached out with its beautiful hands to steady itself in the mortal world, teaching leaves, touching branches, and left stains of brightness where it touched." (p 126, paperback edition)

"The terror of risk was that while it charged Matthew Allen, had him skimming into the future with a harsh exhilaration that felt like delight, while it filled him at every moment with the sense of his own possibility and power, if it failed, if it failed all that rushing energy simply crashed like a carriage into a ditch and there was nothing, there was humiliation, debt, imprisonment, and all that he had defied would be all that there was. That was the risk." (p 184)

"The forest was darkening. Winter was not far off. The black fallen leaves, plastered down by heavy rain, were silvered here and there with frost. The tree trunks were wet. They passed the hooked, blustery shine of a holly Good snail weather." (p 207)

After I finished the book, I headed straight for my computer to check out the closeness to historical fact. The story of John Clare is completely accurate. (As an aside, it’s interesting that Clare, who greatly influenced later poets, is not in The Norton Anthology. I wonder if that has to do with stigma about class or mental illness.)

For a different and fascinating view of Dr. Matthew Allen and his relationship with his brother, have a look at this article.

...more

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May 03, 2014 Soumen Daschoudhury rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2014-reads

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 a 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.
...more

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Aug 09, 2010 Barb rated it did not like it · review of another edition

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

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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Sep 24, 2010 Vernon Goddard rated it it was ok

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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May 24, 2010 Jill rated it really liked it

Shelves: fiction-based-on-history

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 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." ...more

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Sep 17, 2016 John Anthony rated it liked it

Shelves: fiction

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 sta ...more

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Jun 27, 2010 Ron Charles rated it really liked it

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 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/... ...more

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Mar 17, 2011 Jon rated it it was amazing · 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 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. ...more

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Oct 02, 2009 Sarah rated it really liked it

Shelves: recommended-novels, booker-noms, read-in-2011

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 m 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.
...more

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Mar 14, 2016 Hally rated it really liked it · review of another edition

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 p

...more

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Mar 23, 2010 Jane rated it liked it

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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Oct 31, 2011 Vanessa Wu rated it liked it

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 27, 2010 Eric rated it it was amazing · 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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Jul 10, 2010 Tony rated it it was amazing

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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Jul 09, 2014 Sharon Bakar rated it it was amazing

Shelves: fiction, booker, novels, historical-novels

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 histo ...more

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Aug 17, 2010 Elizabeth rated it really liked it

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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Jun 26, 2014 Derek rated it it was amazing

Shelves: literary-fiction, favourites, highly-recommended, read-in-2014, manbooker-books

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 ...more

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Jan 02, 2018 Camilla Zahn rated it it was ok

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. ...more

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Sep 10, 2009 Ruth rated it it was ok

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. ...more

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Jan 06, 2018 Emily-Jo rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: mental-illness, historical, favourite-books

A truly surprising book. Every time I picked it up, I thought, why am I reading this? I have no interest in these topics. And then, three hours later, I would put it down. How did I read that book for three hours? I would say. I’m not interested in anything that’s happening in it, which is to say, very little is happening in it.

And then I would do the same again. I would find myself rushing up to bed at night to read more of it. Opening it with enormous, if slightly puzzled excitement on the tr ...more

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Jan 25, 2020 rosamund rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Shelves: historical

DNF approx 60% of the way through.

This book is trite and pretentious and I wish the author had left John Clare alone.

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Dec 29, 2010 Courtney Johnston rated it really liked it

Shelves: books-about-books, borrowed, biography, fiction

In this very quiet, very beautiful book Adam Foulds takes a historical moment, replete with well and lesser-known historical personages, and breathes radiant life into it.

Foulds takes as his subject the private mental asylum run by Dr Matthew Allen at High Beach, Epping, where in the late 1830s the 'peasant poet' John Clare - by that time already passing out of fashion - is an inmate. Septimus Tennyson - Alfred Tennyson's brother - is a fellow inmate; Tennyson is not yet Lord Tennyson, the Poet ...more

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Nov 01, 2009 Leon rated it it was amazing

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 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. ...more

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About Adam Foulds

Adam Foulds

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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 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 ...more