The Quickening Maze
by Adam Foulds
Vintage Books pp259
ISBN: 978-0-099-53244-6
Love it or hate it, we all learned English poetry at school. My generation, in particular, has recollections of the great Victorian poets of the 19th century: Byron, Keats, Wordsworth, Tennyson and others, but the name John Clare does not figure among them.
Thanks to Adam Foulds’ s novel The Quickening Maze I discovered this Victorian poet. John Clare was forgotten for many years and it was only in the last 50 years or so that he was rediscovered and hailed as one of England’s great rural poets of the 19th century.
Still The Quickening Maze is much more than a novel about poetry. Mr Foulds ably interweaves historical fact and fiction. At the novel’s centre stands John Clare, a farm labourer, who turned to writing poetry and produced a considerable body of work before slipping into madness. Mr Foulds presents a fictional account of John Clare’s four-year stay at the High Beech Asylum for the Insane in Epping Forest run by the charismatic Matthew Allen.
In a way Dr Allen is the “mad doctor” we come across in romantic literature. Already imprisoned for a time due to debts, he was a respected psychiatrist who created a private asylum, run on liberal lines, where John Clare was admitted in 1837. At the same time Dr Allen’s greatest ambition was to invent a wood carving for which he required financial aid and the poet Tennyson was persuaded to invest heavily in the project, resulting in a great loss of money. Tennyson was staying near the asylum to be close to his brother Septimus, who was being treated for depression.
The author depicts in stark contrast the minds of two great poets: Clare, who in periods of madness inhabited various worlds, including that of Byron and Shakespeare, and suffered delusions, but otherwise lived in a world full of light due to his great love for nature, and Tennyson, who prior to his eventual success and wealth, tended more to melancholia and mourning.
Other characters that inhabit the asylum play significant roles in the novel, as does Hannah, Dr Allen’s daughter who for a time was obsessed with Tennyson (another form of insanity?). But the central figure remains John Clare and Mr Foulds’s writing becomes remarkably intense and impressionistic when he de-scribes the poet’s plaintive, visceral images of nature. One character says “England sang through him, its eternal living nature”. After the failure of Dr Allen’s mechanical invention the inmates were released and John Clare went back to his home. A few months later, in 1841 he entered Northamptonshire General Asylum and stayed there still writing poems till his death in 1864.
It was audacious on the part of Mr Foulds to try to inhabit the minds of the mentally deranged and to describe their tormented visions and hallucinations without overly upsetting the reader. He succeeds because this fine novel is exquisitely written and is highly lyrical in tone.
Mr Foulds, an intense young poet-novelist born in 1974, won the Costa Poetry Prize in 2008 with the narrative poem The Broken Word. This verse novella set against the Mau Mau uprising was much praised for its “microscopically lucid vision”, and when he turned to fiction, The Quickening Maze was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2009.
Poetry is still very much alive in our time. When one reads that one of the 33 trapped miners in Chile was given the role of poet by the other miners so as to keep alive the morale of the group and that his writings became the best read of all the communications that reached above ground, one realises that there is something about the human spirit which best finds its voice in poetry, more so when deep happiness or grief needs to be expressed profoundly. Not surprisingly, though John Clare, the peasant poet, wrote his most haunting descriptions of rural landscape in the early poems, probably his most loved ones are the ones written when he was incarcerated.
Anyone interested in knowing more about John Clare and his poetry will find an abundance of literature on the subject. Over the years he has intrigued many creative people – poets, prose writers, musicians. The most recent book to be published about him is The Ballad of John Clare by Hugh Lupton (Dedalus). The author traces a year in the life of the young poet, who living in a time of great agricultural and social change, was horrified at the abuses of the countryside that he witnessed around him. This previously obscure poet, born in poverty in 1793 and dying in an asylum in 1864, is perhaps of more relevance to us now, more than ever before, living as we do in a time of impending environmental catastrophe.
• Ms Lapira is a former University lecturer in the Faculty of Arts, and an art critic, with a passion for books.