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Summary
Summary
"It has been a while since I have read a book as richly sown with beauty . . . A remarkable work, remarkable for the precision and vitality of its perceptions and for the successful intricacy of its prose." --James Wood, The New Yorker
A visionary novel by "one of the most talented writers of his generation"-- The Times Literary Supplement
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize
Based on real events, The Quickening Maze won over UK critics and readers alike with its rapturous prose and vivid exploration of poetry and madness. Historically accurate yet brilliantly imagined, this is the debut publication of this elegant and riveting novel in the United States.
In 1837, after years of struggling with alcoholism and depression, the great nature poet John Clare finds himself in High Beach--a mental institution located in Epping Forest on the outskirts of London. It is not long before another famed writer, the young Alfred Tennyson, moves nearby and grows entwined in the catastrophic schemes of the hospital's owner, the peculiar Dr. Matthew Allen, his lonely adolescent daughter, and a coterie of mysterious local characters. With lyrical grace, the cloistered world of High Beach and its residents are brought richly to life in this enchanting book.
Author Notes
Adam Foulds was born in 1974 and lives in south London. In 2001 he graduated from the Creative Writing MA at the University of East Anglia. In 2007 he won a Betty Trask Award for The Truth About These Strange Times and two years later, in 2009, his novel The Quickening Maze was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Foulds's erudite, Booker-shortlisted debut follows three men-Dr. Matthew Allen, mad peasant poet John Clare, and prodigious pipe-smoking poet Alfred Tennyson-as their fates intertwine at the High Beach mental institution outside of 1837 London. Worried over the cost of the wedding for his eldest daughter, Matthew invents a machine to mass-produce filigreed wood furniture. Ignoring the asylum for his business pursuits, Matthew seeks investors, including the Tennyson family, of whom Alfred's brother, Septimus, is a patient at High Beach. John, meanwhile, spirals into a fantasy world fueled by his obsession with a dead childhood sweetheart, Mary. Things become complicated when John deludes himself into thinking a fellow patient is his dead love. All the while, Alfred, who is at the asylum to be near his brother, is fruitlessly pursued by Matthew's adolescent daughter, Hannah. While Alfred, unfortunately, is the least convincing character, John's madness is richly imagined, and Matthew comes off as powerfully sympathetic as he grows ever more desperate to raise funds for his business gamble. There's a manneredness to the storytelling that devotees of 19th-century British literature will appreciate. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Foulds' novel is grounded in fact. Its setting is High Beach, a licensed lunatic asylum run along enlightened principles by Dr. Matthew Allen. One way Allen intersects with literary history is through the delusional laboring-class poet John Clare, who was his patient for several years. Another intersection is through Alfred Tennyson, whose family had a history of mental illness and who took up residence nearby. Allen's boundless energy was not confined to the treatment of the insane. He became involved in a scheme for the mass production of ecclesiastical wood carvings, and his need for investors led to the Tennyson family's ruin. More focus on one or two characters would have given the reader something to hold on to; instead we get multiple points of view those of not just Allen, but several of his daughters; not just John Clare, but other patients resulting in episodes rather than sustained narrative. Still, Foulds fashions his intriguing premise into fiction with a sure sense of time and place and often lyrical prose.--Quinn, Mary Ellen Copyright 2010 Booklist
Kirkus Review
Foulds, who won England's2008 Costa Poetry Prize for The Broken Word, has written a dreamy fictional account of the year and a half when young, not-yet-famous Alfred Tennyson lived in close proximity to the mental hospital near Sherwood Forest where his brother was incarcerated along with "peasant poet" John Clare.In the 1830s, High Beach is run by Dr. Matthew Allen, a pre-Freudian who prophetically uses what he calls "unbosoming" about the past to cure patients, particularly those suffering from melancholy. Allen, whose early life had its share of darkness, is educated and erudite. He is thrilled to have a distinguished if out-of-style poet like John Clare among his patients. Unbalanced Clare still finds moments of peace in nature and while visiting a nearby gypsy camp. But he is also increasingly delusional. Clare is moved to the lodge for more severe cases after he violently crashes the wedding of Allen's oldest daughter, a wedding where Alfred and Septimus Tennyson are invited guests. Since Tennyson has taken a house near the asylum to be near his almost catatonic brother, Allen's 17-year-old daughter Hannah soon develops a romantic crush on the young poet. Whether this infatuation is fiction or fact, Foulds captures Hannah's inner lifeand all the characters' inner lives for that matter. Although polite, Tennyson barely notices Hannah, too deeply mourning the death of his friend Arthur Hallam, who will become his muse. Without personal savings and desperate for money, Allen invests and loses a great deal of Tennyson's money on an invention that doesn't work. Tennyson writes and mopes. John Clare sinks deeper into distress until he finally leaves the institution and walks home to northern England, where he will spend the rest of his life in a state-run asylum. Although Hannah shifts her romantic fantasies to an aristocratic patient before she accepts that happiness can be found with a realistic suitor, plot matters less here than individual moments, each fully realized and deeply felt.Prose at its poetic best.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Autumn Abigail started neatly at a walk as her mother had just smartened her, plucking and smoothing her dress into place. She had run a fingertip down Abigail's nose as she bent down with a crackle of her own dress and repeated the message to carry. But outside the door and with the sun warm through the trees and the path firm under her tightly laced boots, Abigail couldn't help it: after a few paces she broke into a run. She ran across the garden and over into the grounds of Fairmead House, then along its side and past the pond where Simon the idiot was throwing stones; even she knew he'd been told not to do that. He looked round sharply at the sound of her footsteps just after he'd launched one. It couldn't be stopped: their eyes met at the moment it plopped in and slow circles widened across the green water. It was only the child, though. He smiled naughtily at her, knowing she wouldn't tell. She ran round the corner past Mr Stockdale the attendant whom she did not like. He was large and strict and when he tried to play with her it was not meant, not meant properly, and his hands were heavy. But there was Margaret sitting on a stool, sewing. She liked Margaret, her thin, sharp chinned face like a wooden toy, and wide, clear, kind eyes. She was a peaceful lady, mostly, and now Abigail walked over and leaned against her knees to be for a moment inside that calm. Margaret didn't say anything, stroked once the back of Abigail's head as the child looked down at her sampler. There were three colours of thread: green for hills, brown for the cross and black for lines coming out of the cross. Abigail put out a finger and felt the bumpy black stitches. "God's love," Margaret whispered. "Beams." Briefly she wound the thread she was working with a couple of times around Abigail's finger. "Wrap you up in it." Abigail smiled. "Good day," she said and set off running again, past some others strolling there, and then when she saw him, with greater speed towards her father. Matthew Allen swung the axe down onto the upturned log. The blade sunk down into it, but it didn't split, so he raised the axe and log together and brought them down hard. The log flew apart into two even pieces that rocked on the grass. "Nothing to it," he remarked. He stooped and added the new pieces with their clean white pith to the barrow and stood another log on the stump. Seeing Abigail bouncing towards him, he handed the lunatic the axe and grappled her up into his arms. "Just go on like that until you've filled the barrow, please." Abigail could feel the warmth of his body through its compress of clothes. She wriggled at the sensation of his humid whiskers against her as he kissed her cheek. "Mother says to come now because they'll be here pleasantly." Allen smiled. "Did she say "pleasantly" or "presently"?" Abigail frowned. "Presently," she said. "Then we'd better set off." Abigail leaned her head into his neck, into the smell of him in his cravat, and felt her feet swinging in the air with each of his steps, like riding a pony. Patients greeted her father with a nod as he passed or with some rearrangement of their posture. Simon the idiot, who definitely was not throwing stones into the pond, waved with his whole arm. Outside the house Hannah stood waiting, holding her sharp elbows and thoughtfully drawing a line on the path in front of her with the toe of her boot. She looked up at them as they arrived and spoke as if to justify herself. "I thought I ought to wait to greet them, given that there was no one else." Allen laughed. "I'm sure even a poet is capable of pulling a door bell." He watched his daughter ignore the comment, staring at the ground. Abigail was twisting in his arms now the ride was over, and he set her down. She ran off a few yards to pick up an interesting stick. The front door opened and Mrs. Allen walked out to join them. "Fine weather," she commented. "Are we not too many now?" Hannah asked. "The brother may be a little overwhelmed." "They both might be," her father rejoined. "But a warm family welcome will do neither of them any harm." "I'll only wait with you a moment," Eliza Allen said. "I've things to do, only I saw you all standing out here in the sun. Oh, look, there's Dora seeing us now." Hannah turned and saw her sister's face in the window. She wouldn't come out, Hannah knew. She didn"t like extraordinary people. She liked ordinary people and was preparing for her wedding, after which she could live almost entirely among them. She retreated out of sight like a fish from the surface of a pond, leaving the glass dark. "Abi, put that down," her mother instructed. "And don't wipe your hands on your pinafore. Come here." Abigail joined them in a mildly shamed, dilatory way and allowed her mother to clean her palms with a handkerchief. "Where's Fulton?" Eliza asked her husband. "He's occupied, I'm sure. We don't have to be all arranged here like this. We're not having our portrait painted." This was not how Hannah had arranged this meeting in her imagination. She would not have had the clutter of her family around her, not at first, and she would have happened by at the right moment, or at least could have easily dissembled her preceding vigilance. She could have been a solitary, attractive girl of seventeen, a wood nymph even, discovered in her wandering. She stared along the road as far as she could: it turned sharply to the right a little way ahead and the forest cut off the view down the hill. Through the trees she felt them approaching, an event approaching. Who knew how significant it might prove to be? She should try to expect less; there was little chance it would match her hopes. But it might. Certainly, something was about to happen. People were about to arrive. And then it was happening. The carriage from Woodford was approaching, trunks strapped to its roof, the horses bowing their way up the hill, the driver dabbing at their broad backs with his whip. Quickly, hoping not to be seen, Hannah pinched colour into her cheeks. Mrs. Allen picked up Abigail and held her on her hip. Matthew Allen smoothed his whiskers with both hands, tugged his waistcoat down, and enriched the swell of his cravat. As the carriage slowed beside them, the driver touching the brim of his hat, Matthew Allen stepped forward and opened the door. "Misters Tennyson," he said in his deeper, professional voice. "Welcome to High Beach." A cough and a thank you was heard from the shadowy interior where long limbs were moving. Hannah stood a little closer to her mother as the two brothers emerged. The two Tennysons were tall, clean-shaven and darkly similar. They greeted the three females with courteous bows. Hannah felt close to saying something, but didn't. She heard her mother say, "Gentlemen, welcome." One Tennyson mumbled a reply as they both stood blinking, shifting on their feet after the confinement of the carriage. Both began lighting pipes. The trunks were unfastened and brought down by Dr Allen and one of the Tennysons. Both the Tennysons were handsome, one perhaps more sensitive in appearance than the other--would that be the poet or the melancholic? Hannah waited for them to speak some more. She wanted desperately to know which of these two men her interest should fall upon. Excerpted from The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.