This was one of those books that came out of nowhere. I am by no means a “literary” person – I don’t take the LRB, I only skim the Saturday Review in the Guardian, there’s no real rhyme or reason to why I choose to read a particular book at a particular time. I can’t even remember why this one came across my radar, but I’m very glad it did.
Foulds tells the odd little story of a madhouse in Epping Forest which in the early-mid nineteenth century was home to both doomed John Clare and the brother of Alfred Tennyson. Out of that neat little set-up, Foulds creates a fiercely-imagined world of forest gypsies, religious madness, financial fear and teenage obsession, using compressed, rich language with an earthy naturalness which owes a debt to both Clare and to his establishment counterpart Wordsworth.
It’s not a long book, but it’ll take you a good while to finish, because the intensity of the language is such that you find yourself reading it like a poem (Foulds is, indeed, a poet), lingering over oblique but beautiful sentences, sometimes going back over a whole paragraph or page to dig out little truffles of meaning. It’s a beautiful thing, but not a fragile thing – there’s a sturdy imagination at work here, and although the portrayal of Clare is tragic and sad, it’s Tennyson who’s really stayed with me. A big, clumsy, elephant-headed genius with only fragmentary connections to the real world, it made me want to go back and read more of his work. Ditto for Foulds. Highly recommended.
About Lloyd Shepherd
