39 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Poets and Poetry., October 12, 2009
"One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest" by Ken Kesey and "The Quickening Maze" by Adam Foulds are the two most captivating novels I ever read about mental patients and the persons who look after them.
Foulds uses a poetical language and by poetry he tries to understand the intricate and illogical thoughts of some of the patients. He often describes nature also and uses that as a counterpart for the asylum. The infinite forest encloses the village and the asylum so that the asylum becomes a world on its own. An attempt to free one self as an individual is made impossible by the impenetrability of the forest. This symbolizes the inability of some patients ( one of the most important is the nature poet John Clare ) to understand their personal destiny. It's not that they don't see a goal in life, they just don't know how to reach it.
In the first half of the novel you get bits and pieces of several stories, each of them standing on its own with no connection with the other parts of the novel. It's almost as the language of a schizophrenic who takes pieces of several thoughts and brings them together to form a mangled and incomprehensible language. But as the novel continues everything begins to fall into place to form a story-line and a question: where is the borderline between the sane and the insane?
Based on real events in Epping Forest on the edge of London around 1840, 'The Quickening Maze' centers 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.
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17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Victims and Survivors of Poetry, June 21, 2010
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THE QUICKENING MAZE is not a lengthy book in words but is by no means a quick or easy read. Prior to receiving this book I had only the barest idea who 19th century British poets John Clare and Alfred, Lord Tennyson were. I am glad I did a little research around the basic facts of their lives before starting this novel since I'm afraid I might have found much of the text incomprehensible if I hadn't reviewed their life stories.
The book is set at a mental institution in Epping Forest near London. The asylum, High Beach, actually existed as did its director and founder Matthew Allen. Poet John Clare lived there under Allen's care for several years while he suffered from various delusions and manias. Alfred, Lord Tennyson lived nearby and though he was never an inmate of High Beach his brother Septimus who suffered from "melancholy" was. Apparently Tennyson was well acquainted with Dr. Allen as the doctor convinced Tennyson and other members of his family to invest in a money making enterprise that failed causing financial hardships for Tennyson in the years before he became famous as a poet. Various other inmates, asylum employees, gypsies and family members of the major characters make up the rest of the rather crowded cast of THE QUICKENING MAZE.
Author Foulds has talent at a writer and in a less skilled author's hands this difficult book would have been unreadable. At times the book's writing seems quite pretentious and at other points the reader is jarred by some very earthy descriptions of bodily functions. Those with an interest in Victorian British poets with "quirks" will likely admire THE QUICKENING MAZE but the book is not accessible or engaging enough for the casual reader to readily enjoy.
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10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Lunatic, the Lover, and the Poet . . ., May 26, 2010
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". . . are of imagination all compact," continues Shakespeare, and Adam Foulds might well have taken this for the motto of this novel. The setting is High Beach, a mental asylum run by Dr. Matthew Allen, on the fringes of Epping Forest, East of London. The time is the late eighteen-thirties. The poets are John Clare, a laborer's son briefly celebrated for his rural verse, and Alfred Tennyson, near the beginning of his own career. All three were real figures. Clare was to be institutionalized for the rest of his life, and largely forgotten only to be rediscovered a century later. Tennyson, himself a melancholic, bought a property nearby to be close to his brother Septimus, who committed himself to the asylum. And Allen was an extraordinary figure: "chemical philosopher, phrenologist, pedagogue, and mad-doctor," in the words of his biographer; add to that inventor, entrepreneur, and bankrupt. Adam Foulds has woven these factual strands into a tapestry of the imagination, set equally in the minds of its many characters and the revolving seasons of the English countryside.
The human world of High Beach is an often confusing jumble of inmates, attendants, visitors, members of Allen's family including his lovesick daughter Hannah, together with other assorted children, neighbors, and visitors. It is difficult to keep straight, and made more difficult still when an inmate suddenly starts calling himself by a different name. But although Allen has some sadistic attendants under his unwitting command, he is an enlightened doctor who allows his patients much liberty -- so the world of nature interpenetrates everything. Foulds is at his best when closest to the countryside, as when John Clare wanders far from home as a boy in the prologue, or his several unauthorized excursions from High Beach to visit a nearby gypsy encampment. Or when one of the inmates, Margaret, has a religious vision in the woods: "The wind separated into thumps, into wing beats. An angel. An angel there in front of her. Tears fell like petals from her face. It stopped in front of her. Settling, its wings made a chittering sound. [...] It reached out with its beautiful hands to steady itself in the mortal world, touching leaves, touching branches, and left stains of brightness where it touched."
Like Maggie O'Farrell did in
THE VANISHING ACT OF ESME LENNOX and Faulkner knew before her, Foulds has discovered that the voices of madness permit a less literal approach to storytelling, in which desire and memory can play on an equal footing with fact. At its best, it is a highly evocative approach. But I am not convinced that he uses it to evoke anything very important -- not, for instance, as Pat Barker had done in
REGENERATION when she placed the poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen in a mental hospital against the background of the Flanders trenches. Nor is there anything quite so compelling as Clare's own lines written from captivity: "And yet I am! and live with shadows, tost | Into the nothingness of scorn and noise, | Into the living sea of waking dreams, | Where there is neither sense of life nor joys, | But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems." Foulds can paint the seascape of those waking dreams, but he cannot experience the shipwreck.
But how does one really take a sane reader into the world of madness? Part of Foulds' strategy is to erase the boundaries berween sane and insane. Shakespeare would suggest that there is not much difference between the lunatic and the poet, and with the very soft borders separating the various categories in Dr. Allen's establishment (not to mention the crazy enthusiasms of Allen himself), the two do seem to merge. But an empathetic portrayal of individual torment is really only possible when balancing on the brink, but still retaining some contact with sanity. Foulds' description of John Clare losing himself in the countryside as a boy already has the seeds of all that will become of him, both good and ill. Margaret's vision of the angel is about as far as Foulds could go and still have the reader see through her eyes. But when Clare (as he did) declares himself to be Byron or Shakespeare, the reader can only shake his head and pull back. If this novel lacks focus, as I fear it does, it may simply be because its target is beyond the reach of any lens.
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