The Quickening Maze - Hardcover

Foulds, Adam

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1408461226 ISBN 13: 9781408461228

Publisher: Windsor, 2010

Synopsis

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 therapy. At the same time another poet, the young Alfred Tennyson, moves nearby and becomes entangled in the life and catastrophic schemes of the asylum's owner, the peculiar, charismatic Dr Matthew Allen. For John Clare, a man who had grown up steeped in the freedoms and exhilarations of nature, who thought 'the edge of the world was a day's walk away', a locked door is a kind of death. This intensely lyrical novel describes his vertiginous fall, through hallucinatory episodes of insanity and dissolving identity, towards his final madness. Historically accurate, but brilliantly imagined, the closed world of High Beach and its various inmates - the doctor, his lonely daughter in love with Tennyson, the brutish staff and John Clare himself - are brought vividly to life. Outside the walls is Nature, and Clare's paradise: the birds and animals, the gypsies living in the forest; his dream of home, of redemption, of escape. Rapturous yet precise, exquisitely written, rich in character and detail, this is a remarkable and deeply affecting book: a visionary novel which contains a world. (Large Print Edition)

About this title

Review:

"Adam Foulds is one of the best British writers to emerge in the past decade. His story of [the poet] John Clare's incarceration in a Victorian lunatic asylum is subtle, highly intelligent, and rich in its understanding of the mad, the sane, and that large overlapping category in between."
-Julian Barnes, author of Nothing to Be Frightened Of and Flaubert's Parrot
"What a haunting, fascinating book this is. Foulds leads us deep into a mysterious maze of history, where the demarcations of sanity are blurred, reality competes with dreams, and the truth is what any character imagines it to be."
-Joanna Scott, author of Follow Me and Arrogance
"A remarkable and passionate book. The worlds it creates, the forest and the asylum, and the characters that inhabit them are drawn with a wonderfully strange poetic intensity. It is a wholly original vision, impossible to forget."
-Patrick McGrath, author of Trauma and Asylum
"Tender and scrupulous...what I love most about THE QUICKENING MAZE is its quietness, the silence that makes you lean in until you hear its lovely song."
-Nadeem Aslam, author of The Wasted Vigil
"Exceptional...like a lucid dream: earthy and true, but shifting, metamorphic-the word-perfect fruit of a poet's sharp eye and novelist's limber reach."
-The Times (London)
"[Foulds is] one of the most interesting and talented writers of his generation."
-The Times Literary Supplement (London)
"Impressive...simultaneously poised and flowing in its urgency."
-The Guardian (London)

Review:

"Most notable for its savage descriptions of rural life." (The Guardian)

"It's a work of strikingly beautiful, unforced writing." (The Daily Express)

"A vividly sympathetic exploration of poetry, madness and identity." (The Week)

"The language is simple, sometimes adorned with fleeting and apt images." (Literary Review)

"A seamless blend of historical fact and fiction... Foulds' writing has a poetic intensity and his descriptions are piercingly keen." (The Daily Mail)

"‘Intensely pleasurable to read – studded with electrically acute images and phrases." (The Observer)

About this edition

• Publisher: Windsor
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 1408461226
• ISBN 13: 9781408461228
• Binding: Hardcover