The Quickening Maze - Adam Foulds

A veritable maze of humanity

pp.259

Publisher: Jonathan Cape, 2009. 

The Quickening Maze follows the lives of the poets John Clare and Alfred Lord Tennyson, and of Matthew Allen who runs High Beach Private Asylum, where Clare and Tennyson’s brother Septimus reside. Amongst Clare’s attempts to gain freedom and Allen’s plans to design a machine that mass-produces furniture, along the way getting Tennyson to inject money into the scheme, we also follow Hannah, Allen’s daughter, who is intensely pre-occupied by thoughts of courtship and marriage.

All the individual characters meld in a unique way in this book’s portrayal of how different forms of insane behaviour can affect lives. Matthew Allen’s mania becomes the most pathetic portrait of the book, as he struggles with his impecunious past, fleeing into a future much the same. Tennyson is the larger-than-life poet at a time when poets were a curiosity, when to compose poems could be a revered profession, noble and gentrified. He is an isolated figure, slightly tormented by his isolations, suffering with the critical rejections of his work. The girl who falls for him, Hannah, is young and naïve, anxious to impress and embark upon a woman’s life.

But John Clare, as intended, steals the show. He is a fascinating study of a mind crumbling from delusions and intense, unfulfilled desire. His quest is for freedom in the natural world, for his ex-wife, and for his home. There are gaps in the narrative that reflect the gaps in his own existence as he begins to believe, alternately, that he is a boxer called Jack Randall or the poet Lord Byron. We are flung into a tumultuous confusion as these names come and go without explanation, and as he demands again and again to see his wife who has not been his wife for some time.  

These delusions are substantiated when he comes into contact with a group of gypsies and when he believes one of the other inmates at the asylum to be Mary, his wife (and duly sleeps with her in one frantic, disturbing passage towards the end of the book).

Foulds’ writing in this novel is exceedingly capable, refined to the point of perfection.  His multiple perspectives circle one another expertly, with the pertinent imagery of the asylum at their centre. Perhaps more could be done, in that it is a novel of vaulting ambition and does not quite fulfil its potential. But it is nevertheless a veritable maze of humanity.