In 1837 the poet John Clare was admitted as a voluntary patient to Dr Matthew Allen’s private asylum at High Beech in Epping Forest. Suffering from various delusions, he remained there until July 1841, when he discharged himself and walked home to Cambridgeshire. Another poet who had dealings with Dr Allen during this period was Alfred Tennyson: he had taken a house in the neighbouring village, where he was joined by members of his large family.

Among these was his brother Septimus, who described himself as ”the most morbid of the Tennysons” (which is saying a great deal) and who for a while became another of Dr Allen’s voluntary patients. Always short of funds, and with a history of financial and other irregularities, Allen persuaded several Tennysons to invest huge amounts of money in what he called a "Pyroglyph”, a contraption of his own devising for the machinecarving of wood. The scheme failed and they were virtually ruined.

Allen’s involvement with two of the nineteenth century’s greatest poets is not so much a basis as a springboard for Adam Foulds’s remarkable second novel. Much of the background material is factual, but from these historical details Foulds takes an exhilarating leap into fiction, and The Quickening Maze does not rely on the reader’s knowledge of either poet or their work. While Clare remains the central figure in the story, the action is seen from a wide variety of viewpoints, including those of his fellow inmates and their keepers, and most particularly those of the Allen family who live alongside them.

Foulds captures all these voices without resorting to obvious archaisms, and with a fine sense of the droll, so that his characters seem of their period but very much like us. Since not a great deal appears to be known about Allen’s wife( his third) and their children, the author has been free to create them and fold them into the pattern of his story.

The portrait of Allen himself – who seems to have been, by the standards of the time, enlightened and humane, but who got into a number of scrapes before he was financially ruined – is broadly sympathetic. He is always one step ahead of disaster, a man of quick but genuine enthusiasms: the reader, like the Tennysons and other investors, wants to believe that the Pyroglyph will succeed in reproducing exact replicas of carvings done much more expensively by hand.

Of Allen’s children, the one who commands most attention is seventeen-year-old Hannah, who sets her cap at Tennyson largely because he is a poet and therefore, in spite of his unkempt appearance and rank smell, the very stuff of romance. Her belief that her feelings are returned is as delusional as her father’s belief in the Pyroglyph and phrenology; and both seem only marginally less mad than Clare’s belief that he is the poet Byron or the prizefighter Jack Randall, and that he is married not only to his real wife but also to his childhood sweetheart, Mary Joyce. Epping Forest, beautifully evoked, calls to mind the Athenian wood in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and underlying the novel, though not explicitly acknowledged, is Theseus’s observation that: "The lunatic, the lover, and the poet Are of imagination all compact”. Without being programmatic, Foulds’s novel investigates madness and creativity, sanity and conformity, love and illusion.

Foulds avoids direct quotation of Clare’s writing. Instead he uses his own considerable poetic gifts in showing the world, and in particular the natural world, through Clare’s eyes. This is less a feat of imitation than of imaginative empathy.

Again and again he conjures images that are striking yet precise: ants swarm from a nest ”like the plume of steam from a kettle’s spout”; a terrier sensing an intruder stands ”with its four feet planted, leaning towards him, as if in italics, to bark”; a mineral sample is ”a glittering tumble of right angles, little walls and roofs jutting out from each other like a town destroyed by an earthquake”.

Following his excellent first novel, The Truth About These Strange Times (2007), which was also about the marginalized, and The Broken Word (2008), his extraordinary poem about the Mau Mau uprising, The Quickening Maze confirms Foulds as one of the most interesting and talented writers of his generation.

Adam Foulds
THE QUICKENING MAZE
261pp. Cape. £12.99.
978 0 224 08746 9

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