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The Quickening Maze

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The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds Vintage, HK$104

I would have loved Adam Foulds' The Quickening Maze to win last year's Man Booker Prize. Not only a novel by a poet (Foulds wrote an acclaimed epic, The Broken Word), it is a novel about a poet - two to be exact. The main protagonist is John Clare, whose vivid but unassuming nature poems are highlights of the early 19th century. Appearing in a supporting role is the young Alfred Tennyson. What brings the two together is a place: High Beach Private Asylum, run by Dr Matthew Allen, which is located in Epping Forest, not far from London. The area would prove a magnet for poets: Wilfred Owen and Edward Thomas were both stationed there in the army. Clare, by contrast, is an inmate of the asylum: he was committed in 1837 after a bout of severe and possibly violent depression. As the novel elegantly unwinds, Clare's fragile sense of self shatters into shards: as his late work shows, he adopted the persona of Lord Byron, going so far as to 're-write' parts of Don Juan and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. Foulds writes with supreme delicacy about Clare's plight, and with an impressively realised sense of the surrounding place and time.

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