Adam Foulds on The Quickening Maze
When Clare and Tennyson crossed paths
Congratulations on being longlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction. You've had an fantastic couple of years for a young writer. Have you been overwhelmed by the response to your writing?
It has certainly been remarkable and at times overwhelming. The contrast between the solitude of the writing and the public fuss of publication, readings and prizes can be a little disorientating at times, particularly in the transitions from one to the other. But having readers is wonderful. To get letters and messages from people who have been moved or excited by my work is worth a good deal of dizziness and discomfort.
The Quickening Maze is a historical novel about the poet John Clare. Had you wanted to structure a novel around him for some time?
Actually it was the convergence of John Clare and Alfred Tennyson in Epping Forest, a place I knew very well, which first caught my attention. The immediate structuring was in the contrast in the shapes of their lives leading up to and away from this time: Clare's path leading out from his literary fame into more years in asylums and Tennyson's heading away from early struggles and up into the laureateship, great acclaim, great wealth, and even, in so far as he was capable of it, happiness.
John Clare and Alfred Tennyson crossed paths briefly at the lunatic asylum in Epping Forest in your novel. Was it a challenge to portray these great writers?
Of course it's an audacious thing to attempt and I was well aware of my temerity. I suppose I know what it is to be obsessed by words and to write poetry and I think that, regardless really of the quality of the outcome, those sensations are similar for people who have them, so I felt I shared those experiences. Beyond that, it was a question of immersing myself in their worlds through their writings and other people\s descriptions of them, then trusting to my imagination.
You were writing poetry at sixteen but gave up studying poetry at UEA. Did you continue to write poetry during this time or did you come back to it at a later stage?
No, I continued writing poetry during my time at UEA but I was getting more excited by prose and its possibilities, by drama and character and situation. I returned to poetry properly with The Broken Word, although evidently that is a piece of narrative fiction as well. Narrative poetry is something I think I'll want to return to again.
It's been reported that you've worked as a fork-lift truck driver and you've said in interviews that ‘menial work with very little responsibility..' allowed you to keep your ..'mental space for writing.' Are you now a full-time writer and does this make concentration harder sometimes?
I am and yes concentration can be a challenge. Although having said that I think it depends on how far on I am with what I'm writing. At a certain point whatever it is has accumulated sufficient mass that its own gravitational field pulls me in whether I want to be there or not. At that point it's just easier to work than it is not to. I suppose there's also now a different self-consciousness that comes with being published which needs to be banished.
The Truth About These Strange Times won the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year, The Broken Word won the Costa poetry prize and now The Quickening Maze is longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. What next for Adam Foulds?
Who knows. Those prizes are, like the whole public thing, by-products of writing books that were meaningful for me and that I hoped other people would find intense and enjoyable. I'm working on something new and again hoping that I can make it as good as I can, and that people will want to read it when it's finished.
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(Interview by Sophie Rochester)
