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The Quickening Maze

First published in hardback in 2009 by Jonathan Cape, part of Vintage Publishing, ISBN: 9780224087469. Paperback copy submitted.

The Quickening Maze is a novel that interrogates boundaries between fiction and historical reality. The central research questions are the extent to which fiction can represent real people and whether understanding these people provides an added insight into particular historical moments. Set around 1840 in a private mental asylum in Epping Forest, the novel follows half a dozen characters, among them the poets John Clare, Alfred Tennyson and the asylum owner Dr Matthew Allen. The novel offers the setting and assembled characters as a prism through which to see a particular historical moment, the pivot from the long Regency into the early years of Victorian England, and the concomitant shift of social and literary values. Through the figure of John Clare in particular, the novel meditates on the change in land ownership, lamented in Clare’s poetry, ownership structure that came with the Enclosure Acts. This ramifies out into a concern with environmental destruction as a whole. Embodied in Clare and Matthew Allen are divergent ways of being in the world and seeing it: John Clare is for integrity, being, interdependence, ecology while Matthew Allen sees resource and industrial opportunity. It is a complex exploration of madness, creativity, the nature of freedom and human connection. In the portraiture of John Clare and Alfred Tennyson and the intertextual references to Robinson Crusoe, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and others submerged below the surface of the text – Sir Gawain And The Green Knight and the Showings of Juliana of Norwich - the novel seeks to integrate English literary tradition with more contemporary environmental concerns. The Quickening Maze was shortlisted for the 2009 Man Booker Prize and won the Encore Award, the E M Forster Award, the South Bank Show Prize for Literature and the European Union Prize for Literature.