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Book review: The Quickening Maze
Fiction: Adam Foulds’ second novel about a poet and an eccentric doctor is both lyrical without being fussy
Adam Foulds' "exquisite" second novel, set mostly in the 1840s, tells "two intertwined stories", said Neel Mukherjee in the Sunday Telegraph. The first concerns the nature poet John Clare - and the year he spent in High Beach mental asylum in Epping Forest in Essex, before he left and walked all the way back to his native village in Northamptonshire (in pursuit of his first love, who had died three years earlier).
The other is about Charles Allen, the enlightened but eccentric "mad doctor" who ran the asylum, and his dealings with Alfred Tennyson; the poet's brother Septimus was also mentally ill, and in the novel is treated at the same asylum.
The Quickening Maze is a "poetic" novel, said Lionel Shriver in the Daily Telegraph, but it also tells a good story. Foulds's prose is "lyrical, but never grows fussy or high-falutin".
One of his greatest achievements is the portrayal of lunacy, which is sympathetic without romanticising the horrors of mental illness. The book is very "impressive", said Andrew Motion in the Guardian - a vividly sympathetic exploration of poetry, madness and identity.
The Quickening Maze, by Adam Foulds, 272pp (Jonathan Cape, £12.99) The Week Bookshop £11.69 (incl p&p) ·
