Adam Foulds has previously published two books. The Truth About These Strange Times, the novel for which he won the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year award in 2008, is an offbeat comedy about the unlikely friendship between a brilliant but near-­autistic 10-year- old and an overweight and serially unemployable Glaswegian. The Broken Word (2008) is a novella in verse set during the Mau-Mau uprising in 1950s Kenya. Now, in The Quickening Maze, he takes events from the briefly intertwining careers of the ­poets John Clare and Alfred Tennyson and brings them exhilaratingly to life. Whatever other adjectives might be applied to Foulds’s future career, “predictable” is unlikely to be one of them.

As the novel opens in 1840, Clare is a patient at High Beach Private Asylum, in Epping ­forest. He has memories of his ambi­valent successes as a peasant poet, of “the times he’d been embarrassed by the clumping of his hobnail boots on the polished floors of his noble patrons, an unlikely prodigy invited across the divide for conversation and inspection, then delivered to the servants’ quarters to be fed before he walked back to his cottage”. He has even stronger memories of the landscapes of his childhood and of the native county from which he is exiled by his illness. Descending ever further into insanity and loss of identity (at various times, he believes himself to be Lord Byron, Lord Nelson and a prizefighter named Jack Randall), Clare clings desperately to thoughts of the ­natural world in his attempts to hold himself together.

The man in charge of High Beach is Dr Matthew Allen, a forceful, seemingly self-confident man who sees himself as one of those peacemakers he praises in a sermon to his patients, those “who bring an end to the bitter strife of internal discord”. Yet Allen has his own internal discord. Haunted by memories of past incarceration as a debtor, he devises a wild entrepreneurial scheme to enrich himself and ensure his family’s fortunes. In the end, it proves no more than a financial chimera that plunges him towards despair and potential disgrace. Among the investors he entangles in his dreams of wealth is Tennyson, who has come to lodge locally while his brother Septimus is a patient at High Beach.

Brooding on the iniquities of critics and his failure to find the poetic means to commemorate his friend Arthur Hallam, dead in his twenties, Tennyson scarcely notices the attentions of Allen’s teenage ­daughter, Hannah, who has ­persuaded herself that she is in love with the poet.

As Allen’s finances collapse and Hannah’s fantasies of romantic love disintegrate when they touch reality, Clare discovers that he has further to fall from grace. Already exiled from the imagined paradise of his rural past, he is sent further into the darkness when he is banished to Fairmead House, the place where, behind locked doors that hide the worst crimes even from Allen, the most recalcitrant patients are brutalised into submission.

Towards the end of the novel, Clare manages to escape from Fairmead and remove himself from Allen’s care. He finds a different kind of asylum with a band of ­gypsies in the forest. Sitting among them, “he saw a tree lying on its side, barkless, stripped white, ghost-glimmering through the others… He pitied it, felt suddenly that he was it, lying there undefended, its grain tightening in the breeze”.

In The Quickening Maze, Foulds displays in abundance the same kind of precision of observation and empathy of imagination that he gives here to Clare. Whether he is describing Hannah striving to play the piano for Tennyson while acutely aware that her grimace of concentration is spoiling her looks, or briefly entering the mind of Maggie, a patient with religious delusions who experiences the worst that Fairmead House has to offer, he invites readers to give his characters their closest attention. The world he evokes, so different to the landscapes of his other books, is conjured up with remarkable intensity and economy of means. It is impossible to guess where Foulds will travel next in his fiction, but it is safe to assume that the journey with him will be well worth taking.

The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds
Cape £12.99 pp266

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