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The Quickening Maze: A Novel | 
 enlarge | Author: Adam Foulds
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Category: Book
List Price: $15.00
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Rating:  27 reviews
Sales Rank: 52607
Media: Paperback
Pages: 272
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 7.7 x 5.1 x 0.7
ISBN: 0143117793
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.92
EAN: 9780143117797
ASIN: 0143117793
Publication Date: June 29, 2010
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
A visionary novel by “one of the most talented writers of his generation” (The Times Literary Supplement)—shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize
“Impressive . . . simultaneously poised and flowing in its urgency.”—The Guardian (London)
“The world [Foulds] evokes . . . 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 Sunday Times (London)
“Exceptional . . . like a lucid dream: earthy and true, but shifting, metamorphic—the word-perfect fruit of a poet’s sharp eye and novelist’s limber reach.” —The Times (London)
Based on real events, The Quickening Maze won over UK critics and readers alike with its rapturous prose and vivid exploration of poetry and madness. Historically accurate yet brilliantly imagined, this is the debut publication of this elegant and riveting novel in the United States. In 1837, after years of struggling with alcoholism and depression, the great nature poet John Clare finds himself in High Beach—a mental institution located in Epping Forest on the outskirts of London. It is not long before another famed writer, the young Alfred Tennyson, moves nearby and grows entwined in the catastrophic schemes of the hospital’s owner, the peculiar, charismatic Dr. Matthew Allen, as well as with his lonely, adolescent daughter, and a coterie of mysterious local characters. With remarkable lyrical grace, the cloistered world of High Beach and its residents are richly brought to life in this affecting and enchanting book. Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 27
 Next great British writer? August 27, 2010
Dan Pope (W. Hartford, CT USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Adam Foulds goes to the top of the list of young British novelists with this incredible story of a mental institution in 1837. Dr. Matthew Allen runs the place, poet John Clare is an inmate, and fellow poet Alfred Tennyson is in residence as well as a long-term visitor of his inmate-brother. All are real historical figures, of course, but the author takes the material and shapes it for his own purposes. He gets so deeply inside the heads of his characters that one suspects Foulds can do pretty much anything he likes as a writer, like Ian McEwan, like David MItchell. I'll be looking for all his future books henceforth.
 Incredibly rich, multi-layered and poetic novel August 26, 2010
Bluestalking Reader (Chicago, IL USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I knew John Clare's name, but nothing at all about him before reading this novel. Tennyson I of course knew, since my M.A. is in English literature. But I had no idea the great poet's brother had been in an insane asylum, nor his relation to poet John Clare.
Of course, this is a novel, so liberties are taken. I can't assume what's historic fact and what's embellishment, but the book blends so seamlessly I had no idea what was true and what fictionalized.
It's just such lovely prose, so beautifully written. I normally pick apart every book I read; that's just the editor in me. But with this novel I'd have to really stretch to say anything about it is sub-par. If I'm really picky I could say the "romance" between Hannah and Tennyson was a bit awkward. Not just the literal age difference and what not, but something about it just didn't quite ring true to me. Hard to put my finger on exactly what, but there you have it.
I was pre-disposed to liking this novel. There's the English degree, and the fact I love, ADORE books written from the perspective of the mad. And we won't go into analysis on that, now, will we...
A good read, though. I'd recommend it.
 A matter of taste August 22, 2010
Lynn
As an avid reader, I enjoy reading books in a wide variety of styles and genres. "The Quickening Maze," however, did not appeal. The author, Adam Foulds, takes a potentially fascinating story of a British poet named John Clare and his descent into illness and insanity and flattens it to a stylistic exercise. Clare resides in an outer London asylum run by Dr. Allen whose bizarre obsessions with building perfect machines are certainly intriguing. Meanwhile, Allen's young daughters are falling in and out of love/lust with various famous visitors, including Alfred (not yet Lord) Tennyson. At the same time, other asylum inhabitants display increasingly odd behaviors, including a terrifying religious obsession AND the person managing the asylum for Dr. Allen is assaulting the patients. Hard to believe that a book with so many deeply-in-need-of-help characters can develop in 250 odd pages.
However, this is not a character-driven novel. It is, rather, language driven -- and often the language is indeed luminous and beautiful. The book is structured in extremely short episodic moments, juxtaposed against one another and the plot itself, as the book's title suggests, just grows more and more complicated, more and more dark, more and more dense.
Other readers may find this book to their taste -- it was not to mine.
Victorian style August 20, 2010
Sirin (London, UK)
This novel is typical of those finely crafted 'literary' novels written in exquisitely crafted sentences that make reading a slow process - carefully placed metaphors and similies placed like speed bumps on Hackney or Islington streets, designed to stop you rattling through the pages as you would with, perhaps, a Steig Larsson.
Foulds is certainly one of those sensitive poet novelists, with a silky pen. But the style does work to create an almost misty and gothic world of the High Beach asylum in Epping Forest where the poet John Clare and others were incarcerated in the 19th Century. Using nature not so much as an artifice but as a tapestry on which to imagine the characters of that world, Foulds paints a delicate and moving picture of pompous poets (Tennyson), delicate mad poets (Clar), naive and romantic teenage girls (Hannah), and superbly smug and self aggrandising high Victorian reformers (Dr Matthew Allen, owner of the asylum).
It is a dark and claustrophobic world, but one brought skilfully to life by Foulds' story. Especially if you find all those delicate and equisitely placed metaphors to your taste.
 The Keepers Of The Mad Are At Least As Mad As The Mad They Keep August 10, 2010
Barb Mechalke (in the lovely Finger Lakes Region of Upstate New York)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Okay, some people are going to love this novel...I think that they are the same people who loved 'The Gathering' by Anne Enright. If you like poetry and literature that is on the crazy disjointed end of the spectrum this might be your cup of tea, sadly it was not mine.
This is one of those books that you think you might be able to snarf down in half a day because it's pretty short, has a large font and lots of blank pages between the chapters. But when you get into it you see that it's the other kind of book, the one with not so many words but words that are hard to get through quickly. Some people like this style of writing, you know who you are, others do not. You can see which category I fall into.
I didn't like any of these characters but was moved to weeping by the ending...I think mental illness must be one of the most difficult curses on the planet.
I thought the story was interesting, the characters were interesting, but I really dislike this style of writing. It felt like there was little if any tension for the majority of the story and then suddenly the writer reveals some very disturbing events. The note I wrote to myself as I was reading says 'nothing happens and then everything happens - enough to make you sick.'
I would recommend this for people who like depressing poetry and reading about what might be going on inside the mind of the mentally ill.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 27
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