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De Dwaaltuin (2009)

by Adam Foulds(Favorite Author)

3.16 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

9089530460 (ISBN13: 9789089530462)

languge

English

genre

Historical Fiction

publisher

Ailantus

review 1: Perhaps 3 1/2 stars. A thoughtful imagining of a strange historical episode, when the peasant poet John Clare was confined in a somewhat enlightened mental hospital, at the same time the Alfred Tennyson was seeing to his melancholic brother's stay there too, and the hospital head was trying to perfect a wood manufacturing device that he persuaded the Tennyson family to invest in, before he had actually perfected it. So the story is about varying levels of madness, the varying levels of compassion with which it was treated, the beginnings of the effects of the Enclosure Laws, especially on the Gypsies, and the state of mind of young Alfred Tennyson, who is depicted as having more than the usual strong feelings for his buddy, Hallam, who had recently died.A rather moodily ... morewritten book, told through the perspectives of various characters, of varying states of mental health. An affecting look at people trying to come to grips with what the limits of their world holds for them. The young women who marry seem to come off the best in this case.I will remember something about the Sandemanians, a severe offshoot of the break between High Church and Low Church in early Victorian England. I will remember that guards taking advantage of women prisoners has always been a problem.
review 2: Sublime exploration of delusion - comparing and contrasting the treatments 'peasant poet' John Clare and the Tennysons (Alfred, and his brother Septimus) receive in Dr Allen's Epping Forest asylum. Written with a poet's sensibility to language, but without losing the grip on narrative, as we delve into the paradigm of each dysfunctional character Foulds brings each convincingly alive. It captures Clare's burnt genius better than any. He is rendered as a heart-breaking Icarus - but in this map of disappointment all dreams crash and burn. Yet there is an earthy and sensual beauty here which almost breaks free of society's fetters. less

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