A thin line separates poetry from madness : The Quickening Maze

I finished Adam Fouldes's short novel "The Quickening Maze" wanting to know more about the sad life of poet John Clare, who spent most of his life in an asylum and died obscure, and Alfred Tennyson - and wondered if their paths did actually cross in a mental asylum or if that was Fouldes's novelistic liberty. And that's a good way for a novel to end - with readers wanting to know more. It's not a great book, it's a little too elliptical at times, but it's a very intriguing novel that has a lot of elements and accomplishes its modest goals efficiently and effectively. Some readers may be more drawn to the information about treatment of insanity in the 1830s, others more to the family drama of the Allens - father runs the asylum and squanders family's fortune in a foolish investment in a furniture-making scheme, daughters yearn for marriage as the best way to leave this insular family and the life on the asylum grounds, but - particularly for middle-daughter Hannah - social relations are awkward and opportunities rare. I was most drawn to the literary aspects: Clare seen at first as a freak of nature, an uneducated poet writing about country people, but when his work falls out of fashion he's seen as delusional, insane. There has always been a link between poetry and madness, and Fouldes explores the idea that maybe which side you fall on depends on your social class as much as your condition. Tennyson, whose brother is a patient of Allen, is considered just odd and morose - would it have been a different fate had he been poor and uneducated? As it is, we see him here on the verge of writing his greatest work, In Memorium, as Clare fades off into delusions and madness.