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The Quickening Maze
 
 

The Quickening Maze (Hardcover)

by Adam Foulds (Author)
5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
List Price: CDN$ 32.00
Price: CDN$ 21.12 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over CDN$ 39. Details
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Product Description

Review

"The Quickening Maze confirms Foulds as one of the most interesting and talented writers of his generation."
— Peter Parker, The Times Literary Supplement

"This is a novel that sees its varied cast of compelling characters, all travelling their separate but interlocking journeys, as it sees the natural world-with a tender and scrupulous eye. What I love most about The Quickening Maze is its quietness, the silence that makes you lean in until you hear its lovely song."
— Nadeem Aslam

"Foulds's exceptional novel is 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."
— Tom Gatti, The Times (UK)

"A remarkable and passionate book. The worlds it creates, the forest and the asylum, and the characters that inhabit them are drawn with a wonderfully strange poetic intensity. It is a wholly original vision, impossible to forget."
— Patrick McGrath


From the Trade Paperback edition.


Product Description

Set in a world of disorder and unpredictable dramas, The Quickening Maze is a deeply affecting work of intense and atmospheric imagination. Finalist for the Man Booker Prize.

Based on real events in 1840, Foulds's compelling tale centres on the life of the great nature poet John Clare. After years spent struggling with alcohol, critical neglect and depression, Clare finds himself in High Beach Asylum, built within Epping Forest. At the same time, the young Alfred Tennyson moves nearby and becomes entangled in the life and catastrophic schemes of the asylum's owner, the peculiar yet charismatic Dr Matthew Allen.

Historically accurate but brilliantly imagined, the closed world of High Beach and its various inmates — the doctor, his lonely daughter in love with Tennyson, the brutish staff and John Clare himself — are brought vividly to life, as are depictions of life outside the walls, and Clare's dreams of home, redemption and escape.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

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5.0 out of 5 stars Poets and Poems., Oct 13 2009
By Jan Dierckx (Belgium, Turnhout) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: The Quickening Maze (Paperback)
"One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest" by Ken Kesey and "The Quickening Maze" by Adam Folds are the two most captivating novels I ever read about mental patients and the persons who look after them.

Foulds uses a poetical language and by poetry he tries to understand the intricate and illogical thoughts of some of the patients. He often describes nature also and uses that as a counterpart for the asylum. The infinite forest encloses the village and the asylum so that the asylum becomes a world on its own. An attempt to free one self as an individual is made impossible by the impenetrability of the forest. This symbolizes the inability of some patients ( one of the most important is the nature poet John Clare ) to understand their personal destiny. It's not that they don't see a goal in life, they just don't know how to reach it.

In the first half of the novel you get bits and pieces of several stories, each of them standing on its own with no connection with the other parts of the novel. It's almost as the language of a schizophrenic who takes pieces of several thoughts and brings them together to form a mangled and incomprehensible language. But as the novel continues everything begins to fall into place to form a story-line and a question: where is the borderline between the sane and the insane?

Based on real events in Epping Forest on the edge of London around 1840, 'The Quickening Maze' centers on the first incarceration of the great nature poet John Clare. After years struggling with alcohol, critical neglect and depression, Clare finds himself in High Beach Private Asylum - an institution run on reformist principles which would later become known as occupational therapy. At the same time another poet, the young Alfred Tennyson, moves nearby and becomes entangled in the life and catastrophic schemes of the asylum's owner, the peculiar, charismatic Dr. Matthew Allen.
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