The Quickening Maze by Adam FouldsPenguin, 2010 (Originally Jonathan Cape, 2009)

In the June 28, 2010 issue of the New Yorker, James Wood started a review of this book by calling it “richly sown with beauty,” then going on to call Foulds’s novel “a remarkable work, remarkable for the precision and vitality of its perceptions and for the successful intricacy of its prose.” High praise, and I think The Quickening Maze lives up to it. It’s the story of the poet John Clare, mad, stuck in an asylum on the edge of Epping Forest, where sometimes he’s lucid and sometimes not. It’s also a story about the life of the asylum more generally: Dr Matthew Allen, who runs the place, and his family, and the other patients and the whole circle of nearby life: Alfred Tennyson, who moves into the neighborhood because his brother is a patient, the gypsies who camp in the forest, the local man who owns a factory producing machine parts from hornbeam wood. There is much that is harsh in this book: abuses and horrors in the madhouse, the frustration that Clare feels at being kept captive, Matthew Allen’s financial woes and his anxieties about having been in debtor’s prison in his youth. But there is also much that is lovely, particularly the descriptions of the natural world, the forest that’s the maze at the heart of the novel and at the heart of those who live around it. The forest as a presence keeps appearing: an asylum patient who has visions of God’s love and angelic deliverance feels “the darkness in the heart of the wood” as coming between her and God (21), and Allen and Tennyson talk about the forest as a sign of the flow of energy of the world, a “unitary force” that Allen sees behind all phenomena: “The forest died into itself, growing, shapes fading, eaten, lengthening anew,” and so goes the world, too (25). And the doctor and Tennyson aren’t the only ones who know this: so does Clare: “He loved lying in its lap, the continuing forest, the way the roots ate the rot of leaves, and it circled on” (51).

But the forest isn’t just discussed in these big-picture abstract or symbolic terms: it’s also there quite literally and concretely. Clare knows the natural world and the forest is part of what he knows: when he’s allowed out of the asylum grounds for the day, he enters the forest and goes “past the familiar forms of the nearby trees, out to the strangers that grew hidden for miles around” (41). He notices things in the forest: “the loosely matted leaves, the prickly star-shapes of beech-nut shells, and the roots that ribbed the path” (42). He sees holly bushes and brambles, a blackberry, a blackbird; he sees a rotting tree-trunk and the fungus consuming it, the shards of snail shells smashed by a thrush. (Another patient sees the details of the forest too, and builds a mandala of sorts out of insect wings and feathers and stones and leaves.) Best of all for me: this great list-paragraph, below, in which Clare thinks of the forest’s many inhabitants:

To please himself, to decorate his path into sleep, he passed through his mind an inventory of its creatures. He saw the trees, beech, oak, hornbeam, lime, holly, hazel, and the berries, the different mushrooms, ferns, moss, lichens. He saw the rapid, low foxes, the tremulous deer, lone wild cats, tough, trundling badgers, the different mice, the bats, the day animals and night animals. He saw the snails, the frogs, the moths that looked like bark and the large, ghost-winged moths, the butterflies: orange tips, whites, fritillaries, the ragged-winged commas. He recounted the bees, the wasps. He thought of all the birds, the drumming woodpeckers and laughing green woodpeckers, the stripe of the nuthatch, the hook-faced sparrowhawks, the blackbirds and the tree creeper flinching up the trunks of trees. He saw the blue tits flicking between branches, the white flash of the jay’s rump as it flew away, the pigeons sitting calmly separate, together in a tree. He saw the fierce, sweet-voiced robin. He saw the sparrows. (51-52)