Review of Adam Foulds' The Quickening Maze
John Clare and Alfred, Lord Tennyson at High Beach Asylum
Jun 27, 2009 Elizabeth Gregory
The Quickening Maze is Adam Foulds' second novel, the follow-up to the critically acclaimed debut The Truth About These Strange Times that saw him named Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year for 2008. However, it is his great skill as a poet that shines through in this extraordinarily moving and atmospheric new novel.
High Beach Asylum
The novel is based on the true account of the rural poet John Clare's descent into madness: he was admitted to Matthew Allen's High Beach Asylum in the heart of Epping Forest, near London, in 1837 after suffering from delusions. At around the same time, Epping Forest welcomed another distinguished literary guest when Alfred, Lord Tennyson took up residence at Beech Hill House following the death of his beloved friend Arthur Hallam.
Tennyson is known to have been a guest of Dr Allen for a fortnight, suffering from depression after Hallam's death, and may well have encountered Clare, although in Foulds' reimagining the pair never meet. Instead, the narrative keeps the two very much apart, with Tennyson shown interacting with the Allen family whilst Clare roams the Forest, sleeping rough at local gypsy encampments and imagining himself to be Lord Byron or a prize-winning fighter.
Meanwhile, Tennyson finds himself an object of desire for Allen's seventeen year old daughter Hannah, and an enthusiastic investor in Matthew Allen's scheme to invent a machine that can mass-produce reproductions of hand-carved wooden furniture. This juxtaposition of Tennyson's social involvement with the family and Clare's increasingly deranged wanderings is highly effective, contrasting a poet on the rise and about to find huge fame and success with one on the way down, continuing to write unwanted poetry that is disregarded by all around him.
Imagery in the Novel
Foulds is himself an award-winning poet, with his book-length work The Broken Word taking the Costa Poetry Award in 2008. His economy with words is evident throughout this novel, where seemingly throwaway short phrases create images which linger in the reader's mind - Hannah sees her sister at a window until "she retreated out of sight like a fish from the surface of a pond, leaving the glass dark"; a dog strains forward to bark at Clare, "as if in italics"; a craftsman has "long capable fingers and fingertips so large his hands looked like a waterbird's feet". Every word in this concise novel is made to work hard; nothing is superfluous.
A Modern-Day Arden
Foulds admits to adapting the story of Allen's asylum for his novel, "compressing events that occurred over several years into the space of seven seasons". The effect of dividing the novel into these different seasons is a magical one; the forest takes on the feeling of an enchanted place, a literary successor to Shakespeare's Arden, a private world that revolves around the patterns of nature rather than the outside world. The result is an engrossing novel, drawing the reader into a secret world where only the cries of the mad and the singing of the birds disturbs the sense of quiet that pervades.
The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds is published in the UK by the Jonathan Cape imprint of Random House (2009), ISBN 978-0-224-08746-9.
Cover of The Quickening Maze
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