Featured Reading Guide
Adam Foulds
After a lifetime s struggle with alcohol, critical neglect and depression, in 1840 the nature poet John Clare is incarcerated. The asylum, in London s Epping Forest, is run on the reformist principles of occupational therapy. At the same time, the young Alfred Tennyson, moves nearby and became entangled in the life of the asylum. This historically accurate, intensely lyrical novel, describes the asylum s closed world and Nature s paradise outside the walls: Clare s dream of home, of redemption, of escape.
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Adam Foulds was born in 1974 and lives in south London. He is a graduate of the Creative Writing MA at the University of East Anglia and his poetry has appeared in a number of literary magazines. His first novel, The Truth About These Strange Times , was published in 2007.
topAbout the Book
After a lifetime s struggle with alcohol, critical neglect and depression, in 1840 the nature poet John Clare is incarcerated. The asylum, in London s Epping Forest, is run on the reformist principles of occupational therapy. At the same time, the young Alfred Tennyson, moves nearby and became entangled in the life of the asylum. This historically accurate, intensely lyrical novel, describes the asylum s closed world and Nature s paradise outside the walls: Clare s dream of home, of redemption, of escape.
topStarting Points for Discussion
- According to Andrew Motion, writing in the Guardian, many of the book’s ‘narratives finds its focus or reflection in Hannah’s doomed courtship’. To what extent do you agree or disagree with the idea that Hannah’s courtship is a lens to be viewed through?
- When Hannah strives to play the piano for Tennyson she is acutely aware that her grimace of concentration is spoiling her looks. Discuss the use of humour in the book.
- Foulds has combined fact and fiction in The Quickening Maze. Does it read seamlessly to you?
- Adam Foulds is a poet and a novelist. In the book he imagines the consciousness of two poetic geniuses, Alfred Tennyson and John Clare. Many reviewers have praised the poetic style of the book. Does the style help or hinder the portrayal of these two men?
- How big a part do you think Epping Forest itself plays in the novel?
- ‘When the novel begins, the poet has just been incarcerated in what was, for the 1840s, a progressive institution called High Beach Private Asylum. While we’re not sure at first — Clare’s separation from the forests and wildlife that inspire his rural poetry seems initially a terrible injustice — in short order we’re left in no doubt: Clare is mad’ (Lionel Shriver, Telegraph). How do you think Foulds challenges our perception of madness throughout the novel? Do you think Clare is mad at the beginning?
- ‘Annabella was herself unequivocally beautiful, really exquisite, and to a degree that made Hannah puzzle over precisely what it comprised, what made someone beautiful. Beauty was so fugitive and variable in so many people and among her father’s patients she’d seen many an example of it extinguished, distorted or reversed, but there in Annabella it sat and stayed all day. She was always beautiful.’ Discuss notions of beauty in the novel. Which do you think are the strongest and why? What makes someone or something beautiful?
Other Books by Adam Foulds
The Broken Word
Set in the 1950s, The Broken Word is an extraordinary poetic sequence that…
The Quickening Maze
After a lifetime s struggle with alcohol, critical neglect and depression, in…