My Review of The Quickening Maze, for Verbal (Belfast Telegraph)

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• The Quickening Maze
• Adam Foulds
• Jonathan Cape

Mad, Bad and Dangerous

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Sebastian Barry’s review of Adam Foulds’ book-length narrative poem, The Broken Word, for which Foulds won the 2008 Costa Prize, is quoted on the back-cover of The Quickening Maze, Foulds’ second and most recent novel. ‘A miracle and a masterpiece’, Barry writes. The same can be said for The Quickening Maze.
A few pages into the novel, this reviewer learned of its long listing for the 2009 Man Booker Prize. More recently the short list has been announced with Foulds’ inclusion. Rightly so. The Quickening Maze is an intensely poetic work with a poet as its main protagonist, the famed peasant poet, John Clare. Foulds tells the heartbreaking story of Clare’s slide into mental illness and incarceration in High Beach Private Asylum, on the edge of Epping Forest. The novel follows seven consecutive seasons in the lives of a group of people pivotal in the history of the asylum, namely Dr. Matthew Allen and his family, and two of High Beach’s most famous patients, John Clare and Septimus Tennyson, the brother of another famous poet, Alfred Tennyson. The affairs and destinies of these people become embroiled when Dr. Allen, a creative and charismatic figure, dreams up another hair-brained scheme to make money, securing the necessary financial investments from the Tennyson family. When the business turns sour, calamity and ruin befalls Foulds’ protagonists.
Foulds brings these historical figures brilliantly to life. Seamlessly moving from one point of view to another, pace gathers as voices and characters begin to overlap without once tangling up the reader. Towards the end of the book, Foulds employs a subtle cinematic device, delicately drawing back from his story as if holding a zoom-lens camera, which gives the reader time to close on the sad and dramatic events that have unfolded.
Foulds’ language is particular, intense, precise - but also deeply insightful. Some of the most beautiful sentences this reader has found in recent fiction are here, such as: ‘He sank into a feeling of humiliation. It had an unclean warmth, like pissed-into bath water.’
But the book belongs to John Clare, who it miraculously brings to life. The long walk Clare makes from the edge of London to Northampton, for which he is famed, is agonisingly delivered in Foulds’ final chapters. The novel is also a brilliant study of a fractured and rapidly disintegrating mind, as well as an accurate account of the horrific care of the mentally ill during the 19th century. Foulds also repeats the trope of fracture and loss in the novel’s account of the changes in the British landscape with the selling-off of huge swathes of common land (commonage) and the devastating effect this had on the rural working-class. As the outsider in this year’s Booker Prize, this particular ‘miracle’, might just win.
Jaki McCarrick