The quickening maze

Guardian Review

High Beach, on the edge of Epping Forest in Essex, is a strange poetic vortex. Wilfred Owen and Edward Thomas were stationed there during the first world war; we have no evidence that they met. Seventy-odd years earlier, a better-known literary overlap occurred in the same vicinity, thanks to one Matthew Allen. Allen was founder of the High Beach Private Asylum, the institution that first gave shelter to John Clare. He was also a friend of Alfred Tennyson, doctor to Tennyson's brother Septimus, and eventually (by persuading them to put money into a half-baked wood-carving scheme) the cause of their bankruptcy. You wouldn't know any of this today, driving through the Epping commuter belt, but it's a resonant place for literary archaeologists. As it is for Adam Foulds, who recently published both an acclaimed first novel, The Truth About These Strange Times, and a prize-winning long poem "The Broken Word", which adroitly mixed facts with imaginings. His new novel, The Quickening Maze , manages the same combination with equally impressive results. Without any of the clunking that is generally audible in stories featuring real people, the book focuses on Allen, Clare and Tennyson, allowing them to seem both fully imagined characters and recognisably actual figures. It's the accuracy of Foulds's writing that guarantees this - that, and his sympathy with the people he's presenting. We see it in small human details (the myopic, unwashed Tennyson bending to undo his skates, so that the crown of his head becomes visible: "Thick hair, actually thick hairs - a wide diameter to each hair - flowed from the crown in strong waves"); we find it too in the sensitive articulations of contemporary history. (Clare complaining to the Gypsies who live in the forest: "It's criminal what is nominated law now. Theft only, taking the common land from the people. I remember when they came to our village with their telescopes to measure and fence and parcel out. The gypsies then were driven out. The poor also.") This blend of true and invented is given its freest expression in Foulds's treatment of the Allen family and in his presentation of the patients and work in the hospital. At the beginning of the novel we encounter Allen himself as a person of unusually liberal sympathies - someone who did as much as possible to cure his patients by talking to them and setting them therapeutic physical tasks, and incarcerated them only as a last resort. (The asylum was divided into two sections, one for less severe cases, one for dangerous self-harmers, to reflect this intention.) His conversations with his charges, his efforts to reconcile family life with work life, his anxiety about a dodgy past (money troubles), his difficult relationship with a disapproving and parsimonious brother, Oswald - all these things work to sap his optimism, just as the sly bru tality of his right-hand man Stockdale threatens to undermine his philosophy of nursing. The pathos of his story, which Foulds unfolds in lavish close-up, lies in the doggedness with which he perseveres, and in his inability to change either his character or his luck. Another kind of thwarted free-thinking is evident in Allen's 17-year-old daughter Hannah - except that where her father's mind is able to lead him into the wide world of care, hers is fixated on men, marriage and her own particular future. When the two Tennyson brothers arrive in High Beach (Septimus for a cure, Alfred to lend support), the poet takes her fancy. Much of what follows in the book's other narratives finds its focus or reflection in Hannah's doomed courtship. Hannah wants to lose herself to find herself. John Clare can't help losing himself more or less entirely as the book develops. Initially he is an inmate still in touch with his poet-self - mourning the changes to his home landscape in Northamptonshire, troubled by the absence of his nearest and dearest, and depressed by the withering of an audience for his writing. But as contact with the Epping Gypsies rekindles his sense of isolation, and as his mental confusions lead him into a deluded love-relationship with a fellow patient, the agonies that filled the last part of his life creep up on him. He flits into the character of Jack Randall the Boxer, and into the persona of Lord Byron, before flitting altogether in the closing pages, and walking out of Essex back to his native place, Helpston. Foulds embeds these individual dramas in the general life of the asylum, where patients with religious mania, with self-fear and self-loathing, and with varying degrees of fantasy existence are made to seem genuinely disturbed and pathetic, rather than merely figures in a frieze of distress. The key to this success is the concentration of Foulds's writing, which manages to seem both simultaneously poised and flowing in its urgency. Alan Hollinghurst is one of the few other contemporary novelists to catch this blend of something essentially poetic and something essentially to do with prose. It makes The Quickening Maze look shimmery yet feel resonant, and creates a lush metaphorical life within the shapes of the narrative. Yes, it's a novel about two famous poets and a slightly less famous asylum. At bottom, though, it's a story about identity, which is variously explored through Matthew Allen and his family, through the inmates of the asylum, through two great and greatly different writers and through the Gypsies who live in their hinterland. As Foulds asks us to contemplate their fates, he frames questions about the nature of selfhood, and how its discovery relies on facts as well as invention. Hannah is just as important as the novel's big names in this respect. When she eventually clears her mind of Tennyson and finds a more likely suitor, Foulds says: "after so much nothing at all, life was finally happening, but not at all as she'd imagined." It's an innocent-seeming reflection, but one that contains the warnings, as well as the opportunities, of the entire story. Andrew Motion's most recent collection of poems, The Cinder Path, is published by Faber. Caption: article-motionfoulds.1 As it is for Adam Foulds, who recently published both an acclaimed first novel, The Truth About These Strange Times, and a prize-winning long poem "The Broken Word", which adroitly mixed facts with imaginings. His new novel, The Quickening Maze , manages the same combination with equally impressive results. Without any of the clunking that is generally audible in stories featuring real people, the book focuses on [Matthew Allen], [John Clare] and [Alfred Tennyson], allowing them to seem both fully imagined characters and recognisably actual figures. It's the accuracy of Foulds's writing that guarantees this - that, and his sympathy with the people he's presenting. We see it in small human details (the myopic, unwashed Tennyson bending to undo his skates, so that the crown of his head becomes visible: "Thick hair, actually thick hairs - a wide diameter to each hair - flowed from the crown in strong waves"); we find it too in the sensitive articulations of contemporary history. (Clare complaining to the Gypsies who live in the forest: "It's criminal what is nominated law now. Theft only, taking the common land from the people. I remember when they came to our village with their telescopes to measure and fence and parcel out. The gypsies then were driven out. The poor also.") - Andrew Motion.