CLUMPS AND VOIDS

READ BENEATH ROCKET'S RED GLARE

The Quickening Maze walks through seven seasons at a small English family-run madhouse in Epping Forest. Resident - and unpublishable nature poet - John Clare cycles through delusional bouts as a pugilist, friend of gypsies (with their hedgehogs cooked in clay), and Lord Byron. The owner/ physician ingratiates himself with Alfred Tennyson and his resident brother, only to then squander the Tennyson inheritances in a doomed, monomaniacal manufacturing scheme. Margaret is instructed by an angel, and raped by attendants.

The book is slow, quiet, odd: full of hands and the smoke of charcoal-burners. Details come into focus with the monocular vision of the mad. The pervasive sadness arises from the facts as told, not their historical basis.

"Mary's mouth was tired. She felt as if she'd spoken for days, for weeks, her spit thickening to a paste, her tongue always lifting and falling to spread the Word. She had lost the ability to sleep. At most she experienced a quick splash of black in the depths of the night before waking again, already praying and speaking. As she walked, the world bulged towards her, close and particular, full of signs."

"Peter Wilkins was an old attendant. 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. He had had his fill of restrainings, bathings, arguings, and had now taken upon himself the duty of keeping the gate."