Having set myself the task of reading the Man Booker shortlist, I am now in the embarrassing position of having only blogged on the winner. “Wolf Hall” was a gripping book made even better by author Hilary Mantel’s thorough grasp on Tudor England. I fully intend to get round to writing about the others, and to show my good intentions, here’s my next offering.
I’m afraid I can’t be as glowing and generous to another of the short listed books set in the past, this time around 1840. Adam Foulds’s The Quickening Maze tells of a mental hospital (lunatic asylum), which was purportedly radical for its time, whose inmates included the nature poet John Clare and the brother of Alfred Tennyson.
Both Tennysons are central to the book, and Alfred comes to life through his seeming inability to wash himself. To add to the roll call of past celebrities we also have “B” lister Mathew Allen, the owner of High Beach Asylum, who, it has to be said, seems as mad as his charges.
The Quickening Maze gives the reader well drawn characters but no real substance and no discernible direction. John Clare misses the outside world and his beloved nature, Mathew Allen goes bankrupt, gets ill and dies while Tennyson loses substantial sums of money investing in one of Allen’s ill-fated schemes.
The book’s undoubted originality unfortunately gets bogged down in the real desire to know what’s going on. That’s a shame as Adam Foulds’s drama has quite a lot going for it. It’s a shame that it also has a real down side.
