‘The Quickening Maze’ by Adam Foulds

There is absolutely no doubt that Foulds is an extraordinary wordsmith, lyrical and raw. What a shame then that I find his storytelling a great deal less than compelling. I found nothing to love in ‘The Quickening Maze’, an example of what I have coined as Historical Faction.

For a very long time this book feels like a series of Victorian vignettes. It’s a third person narrative but there are so many, far too many in my mind, characters and we flit between their points of view so fast at the beginning, well the first two thirds really, of the work that it’s impossible to grab hold of any of them. The superficiality of the huge cast of characters (for a short novel at 256 pages) highlights the lack of a premise or conflict. Again, there’s no plot to grip. As a reader I was just lost in swathes of Fould’s very powerful description.

There’s not a lot of beauty in the description either. Foulds likes gross out scenes – colonic irrigation, the butchery of a deer – both powerful, but essentially pointless scenes. Foulds is fantastic at picturing a character – he is enormously visual – but very few of the characters are revealed below their surface. He’s a master of simile, but the shallowness of the book left me distinctly dissatisfied. Here’s a description of a (pointless) character that I liked:

“His heavy face was pouched and drooping. The lower lids of his watery eyes hung so low that they showed a quarter of an inch of their red lining like a worn-out coat with failing seams.”

There’s lots of this sort of stuff in there where you think wow – that’s really clever. But Foulds is a bit too clever with his words, a bit too over engineered. It’s rather like he forgot to make us care.

There are three characters we know better than the others by the end. And they don’t include Tennyson who is merely a dirty, smelly emotionally distant poet who gambles his family’s fortune on Matthew Allen’s schemes to make a fortune from the dawn of industrialisation. Matthew Allen we see clearer. There’s nothing endearing about him though. He’s just a man trying to make money who fails, neglecting the mad-house under his watch at the same time.

We live the other poet, John Clare’s madness. And that’s sort of interesting but we never truly understand the cause or consequence of his madness. Sometimes it feels like an excuse for other literary reference to Byron, Crusoe and such. But his meanderings are repetitive and not insightful.

Hannah, Matthew’s daughter was the only character I had any real interest in as she, as Victorian women do, focussed on snagging a husband whilst coping with having a much better looking best friend. She’s proactive and thoughtful and explores her emotions. But she doesn’t really do anything. Rather like her younger sister, Abigail. Sweet but irrelevant.

There’s not much more for me to say on this. I had hoped for more from the underdog of the Man Booker prize but am left underwhelmed. I am going to try to read a few of the others before the prize is awarded, but if this is judged ‘The Book of the Year’ it will be sorely disappointing for everyone, I think.

PS Update on 1st October. Here’s a blog by Adam Roberts at Royal Holloway, University of London (in fact if memory serves me correctly, I think he was one of my tutors) who as a Tennyson expert, totally understood ‘The Quickening Maze’. I understood it better after reading his blog too, and mildly justified in my opinion in the review by Adam’s line “…the book is as much about poetry, or poetic perception, as it is about a series of events.”