The quickening maze - Adam Foulds

The forest made its little eating sounds

I read from four O'clock yesterday afternoon till ten-ish, finishing this book, only stopping for a meal. Something I haven't done in quite a while!

I learned a lot about Tennyson, who I knew mostly by name, and John Clare, who I did not know at all before reading this novel. I liked the quietness and subtleness of the sentences. Sometimes, especially in the parts when the character of the asylum are more and more schizophrenic, I found the language sometimes hard to follow, rereading paragraphs and still not quite understanding them. Sometimes this was the language, sometimes the history. As an example, you need to know that John Clare rewrote several poems by lord Byron to understand the part where he feels he is Byron.
Nature plays a big part in this novel. It is made up of seven seasonal chapters.
The novel is set in High Beach, in England's countryside. You feel in everything that this is a quiet place, where nothing much happens, the opposite of big town London, where John Clare used to live. A small town, surrounded by forests and ponds. When seeing this landscape and forests through the eyes of John Clare, you feel he is a nature poet, I found this beautifully done. The plot, for whatever is there, is loosely connected in small moments. The asylum owner needs money for the wedding of his daughter and thinks of a scheme with machine build woodcraft. His other daughter is seventeen and looking for love. Tennyson just lost his best friend and comes with his depressed brother to find some rest. John Clare wants to get out and go to his home. It is not these plot lines that make the novel, it is the voice and style of the writer.

This is the second novel this year I read about an asylum in the Victorian age. Here violently deranged people were still kept restrained in a separate building, in the dark, which felt horrifying to me, but as much as possible, patients ate and interacted with the doctor's family on a daily basis. When behaving they got a pass to go outside the premises and walk in the forest, as John Clare got when he went to meet the gypsies living there. In 'A place called winter' I think to recall the asylum was in the US or Canada. This was another deal, where people were locked up inside and had to stay in cold water baths for hours on end. 
I never heard of debtors prison before, and the other non fiction book I am reading alongside this novel talked about it also!
I do need to watch out with these kind of novels about madness, they tend to get me in my mind.