Adam Foulds in London. Photograph: Richard Saker. via The Observer.

Adam Foulds — born in northeast London in 1974 — is an intriguingly diverse writer. Few burgeoning British and American authors have strayed from their respective comfort zones as he has in the last five years, setting his work in different eras and foreign cultures. Although Foulds is arguably a straight, trick-free storyteller, he is a firm believer in the creative process, namely the ability to record and to imagine: he is unafraid to tackle times he hasn’t lived in and real events he has never experienced. This boldness is increasingly exemplified, in chronological succession, by the three works he has published to date. It is as if with each new offering he is acquiring additional boosts in confidence and larger reserves of authorial freedom to write about whatever he wants.

His debut novel, The Truth About These Strange Times (2007), features an overweight unemployable misfit called Howard who befriends Saul, a ten-year-old child genius with a capacious memory. When Saul’s overweening parents enter him in the World Memory Championships he begins to buckle under the strain of revision and the pressure of living up to their ridiculously high expectations. Howard comes to the rescue by whisking him away. The pair form an unlikely alliance as they embark on a mini-road trip, ending up in Howard’s native Glasgow. There they stall, because big blundering Howard with his heart of gold and good intentions acted on a whim and had not thought out his escape plan. The search party closes in, Howard the kidnapper is corralled, and the boy is ‘rescued’. Foulds serves up a colorful if conventional tale, with character as its main strength. Howard and Saul are two endearing oddballs who are all the more sympathetic for being bowed and almost broken by the demands set by society and family, both of which are deaf to their cries for help.

However certain of the novel’s characters have serious design faults. Bizarrely, Foulds comes unstuck when dealing with the general rather than the particular (bizarre because this is the reverse of the norm: most novelists are sound on the basics and struggle with their character’s inner-workings). Howard works better as a character the more Foulds picks away to highlight his naivety and gaucheness, but falls flat when he opens his mouth to talk. His dialogue convinces but his accent is dead wrong. ‘Now listen, pal,’ he says to a man who believes him to be a fellow-paedophile, and who offers Howard cash for a quick fumble with his ward. ‘In a second I’m gonnee let go of you and you’re gonnee go away nice and quiet.’ As a real Scot I can smoke out a faux-Scot anywhere. ‘Gonnee’ is laughable and takes the sting out of Howard’s threat. Later, when Howard justifies this consensual abduction, he says ‘We’re no doing anything bad. We’s just getting away.’ Not content with putting into Howard’s mouth a word that no one in Scotland ever utters (‘we’s’), Foulds renders Howard even more inauthentic by having him use the perfectly adequate ‘we’re’ just prior to it; instead of duplicating it in the second sentence, he unleashes his perplexing ‘we’s’. Howard not only speaks bad Scots, he speaks it inconsistently.

An unfortunate trend develops. Foulds, an Englishman, is on shaky ground when giving voice to his non-English characters. Howard gets drunk with some Russians, his clarity blurs and his hearing becomes hazy. We know they are Russians because Foulds has chipped away definite and indefinite articles. They sound like bad actors impersonating Soviet spies. We are told of one character that ‘It was her foreignness, maybe, but to Howard she seemed very far away when she wasn’t speaking.’ By contrast, to us her English is so predictably bad she seems far from away when she is speaking. Then the Russians give Howard vodka for the first time in his life: ‘I’m from Scotland. We drink whisky there.’ Again, Foulds allows the general to contaminate his characters’ particular authenticity — their realness is derailed by their voice and, in this case, their culture.

Howard sloughs off more credibility later when, after being duped into acting as guarantor in a deal to bring a Russian girl over to the UK, he talks to her on the phone. First Irina is ‘darling’, but then Foulds remembers Howard is Scottish and so has him call her ‘hen’. It’s a classic example of an overdone stereotype. A Glaswegian would say this, but not here and, crucially, not this one. Instead of cherry-picking choice trademark attributes for his characters to wear discreetly in their buttonholes, Foulds prefers to baste them all over with every label under the sun. Bumpkins become caricatures and deflate on the page. Foulds tries too hard for characterization, but the usual and converse result of his attempts is a gamut of lazy generalisations. When Howard confesses to lapsing into poor pidgin English to accommodate the Russians we are almost relieved at the respite from the weak approximation of Scots he is given to spout normally. Simply stated, The Truth About These Strange Times contains the worst imitation of Scots I have seen since a woeful short story by Updike entitled ‘Farrell’s Caddie’ in which he describes the caddie Sandy blithely corrupting the English tongue ‘with those hiccups or glottal stops the Scots accent inserts.’ (At one point he hands Farrell a 7-iron and says ‘Ye want now tae geh oover th’ second boosh fra’ th’ laift.’ No, me neither.) Updike had the excuse of living further afield; Foulds, just over the border, can’t be let off so lightly.

Interestingly, Foulds’ foreigners’ voices only ring true when they break free of their national constraints, shrug off all cultural specificity and speak a universal foreigner-English. There is Alf, the Portuguese chip-shop owner and Howard’s former boss: When he describes him as busy ‘chirruping away in his funny English’, Foulds doesn’t even try aiming for precise, perfect Portuguese-flavoured English; Alf’s English is generically mangled and thus successfully transformed into a catch-all everyman-foreigner. By the same token, we delight in the print on a Russian’s business card, ‘Misha – Your Windows Cleaner’, because it is a mistake any non-native speaker could make. It is unfortunate Foulds botches it elsewhere by stifling his characters with clichés. In The Truth About These Strange Times even a newspaper fails to convince when it luridly advertises a ‘supabright stunna’ on its pages. When, one wonders, did Foulds last read a tabloid?

In his second novel, 2009’s The Quickening Maze, Foulds does something altogether more ambitious with voice: he puts words into the mouths of real people, and nineteenth-century people at that. The novel tells of true events in and around Dr Matthew Allen’s High Beach Private Asylum in Epping Forest on the fringe of London in the 1840s. In Fould’s account the two poets Alfred Tennyson and John Clare both appear, the latter as a patient and in a central role. Allen, working on ‘therapy for the insane’, welcomes Tennyson and his brother Septimus, who is to be treated at his asylum. He informs the poet that he specialises in melancholy, ‘the English malady’, and that he sets great store on a patient’s ‘unbosoming of anxieties’. Septimus will be expected to disclose his personal fears. His brother murmurs to Allen something about ‘The black blood of the Tennysons’, and the poet himself displays it for us later when a livid Tennyson accuses the Doctor of swindling him.

John Clare is vividly brought to life. His poetry is renowned for evoking the minutiae of the countryside, his microscopic attention to landscape detail as opposed, say, to Wordsworth’s panoramic sweep, and Foulds expertly duplicates this in his character’s observations and diseased mind. By extension, he also expertly captures Clare’s pathos and belief in the vulnerability of nature. Seasons change, plants wither, creatures die. Foulds has Allen utilize his phrenological talents to compare Clare and Tennyson. Both are markedly different poets and yet possess similar foreheads, but we learn that in manner Tennyson is more like Keats, sharing his ‘gravid silence’, according to one character, ‘but not Keats’ quickness, his darting anger.’ This is a novel in which poets flit in and out, either in person or in absentia. Even Dryden’s verse gets a mention, although critical, the author describing it as ‘long, solid, dully rectangular poems in rhyming couplets’ (scorn which puts us in mind of the real-life Clare’s antipathy towards the polished smoothness of Pope’s poetry).

Foulds stays semi-faithful to real events but gleefully lets his imagination run riot when describing each of Clare’s breakdowns. We follow his incarceration and therapy-torments, his happy fellowship with gypsies in the forest (one of them informing Clare in her argot that ‘we’s an atrocious tribe’ — nineteenth-century gypsies speaking like twenty-first century Scots), and at the end of the novel we escort him during his long journey on foot to his home town.

Unlike Foulds’ first novel, the descriptions are for the most part quietly unobtrusive. The poetics are toned down, stripped of fanfare, and are all the more beautiful for it:

The forest was darkening. Winter was not far off. The black fallen leaves, plastered down by heavy rain, were silvered here and there with frost. The tree trunks were wet. They passed the hooked, blustery shines of a holly. Good snail weather. Their reins creaked. The bits clicked in the horses’ mouths as they breathed large clouds.

Most new writers stumble with the putative difficulties of the second novel. Not Foulds. The Quickening Maze is an extension of its author’s range; by immaculately recreating the past and subduing his own language, Foulds presented a virtuoso performance that was a clear improvement on his earlier work.

That was 2009. In 2008, between both novels, Foulds did something completely different: he wrote a poem. This was a daring decision. A century ago it was almost de rigueur to flaunt your multifarious literary credentials — D. H. Lawrence, Kipling and Hardy were accomplished poets as well as novelists; Wilde and Beckett adroitly, ambidextrously, produced both excellent drama and prose. Today writers with such dual talents are treated with scepticism and more often than not advised to stick to the one genre they are believed to excel in. Managing both is possible but an artist has to be exceptionally good to pull it off.

Fortunately The Broken Word is a masterpiece. Not only does Foulds prove he is as adept at writing poetry as prose, but he shows he is more comfortable with poetry. Indeed, both of his novels are so awash with lyrical flourishes we could argue he is a poet first and foremost. In The Truth About These Strange Times a chair makes a ‘cartilagey creaking sound’, a tree is ‘wristy’, and an old lady has ‘blue tree of vein’ under her skin. At one juncture we are told, or warned, that ‘the world abrades your finesse away.’ In The Quickening Maze there is a dazzling scene in which Clare strolls through the forest, navigating its ‘maze of echoes’ and eyeing ‘trundling badgers’ and ‘the glaring, hooked darkness of holly bushes.’ (It is a daring enterprise for Foulds to enter Clare’s mind and portray for us the poetic print-out: the observations he records, as witnessed and acknowledged by Clare, have to be as good as Clare’s poetry.)

The Broken Word is a narrative poem and so retains the prose-like push of the novels but it is essentially energised by rhythm, propelled by both soft and brutal cadences. In addition it is able — that is, ‘allowed’ — to bask in less literal, more poetic language. The dilemma for a writer so competent in poetry and prose is how to prevent the former from constantly seeping into the latter. Poetic descriptions in poems blend seamlessly, necessarily, into the verse; in fiction they jar the reader and the author may be charged with using flowery and over-wrought language. In that first novel we hear that a sky is ‘star-fretted’, that Howard ‘invisibled himself’, and that a wall ‘clucked’ as Saul scrambled over it. Worse, that Saul’s mother ‘remembered being a little girl and sitting halfway up the stairs, the small crockery of her forehead becoming vivid to her as she rested it between two banisters.’ There is a rare lapse in The Quickening Maze where a dog leans to the side on all four legs, ‘as if in italics’. Foulds takes too many liberties with his poetic licence here (and is as ‘guilty’ as Clare, who was eventually locked up in the General Lunatic Asylum in Northampton on the charge of ‘years addicted to poetical prosings’). But there is a home for that poetic licence in The Broken Word. Here Foulds’s language is colorful rather than florid, subtle instead of elaborate.

Subtitled ‘An Epic Poem of The British Empire in Kenya, and the Mau Mau Uprising Against It’, The Broken Word expertly chronicles an Englishman’s loss of innocence and a country’s catastrophic meltdown. It begins with a rail journey, with ‘people posting themselves, third class, into the train windows’. Gradually we are introduced to Africa, all ‘lion-coloured slums’ and ‘cattery stink’. We encounter Tom, a young man returning from England to the family farm in Kenya to spend his final holiday before starting university. He is apprised of the critical situation unfolding and the ‘oathing’ around his father’s estate — ‘The ceremonies, the pledges: join or your throat cut. Or worse.’ The displaced Kikuyu are launching vicious attacks against the ruling colonial powers. We come to a short section where two older British men are butchered by their servants with panga blades, which in turn leads to heavy British reprisals consisting of beatings, mutilations and racist abuse. Foulds positions himself in the middle, betraying no hint of partisanship and apportioning an equal quota of wickedness to each camp. He is particularly good in his poetic depiction of violence, aware that the trick is to sketch light but trenchant strokes, and resist painting an all-splatter splurge. His character-victims receive their punishments meekly, almost stoically, and each perpetrator metes it out with a similar calmness. Killing is a quest for justice, readdressing a lopsided balance.

Tom undergoes his own baptism of fire at his father’s instruction: ‘it’s time. I’m afraid, you know, to be a man and all that.’ He joins the ‘gentlemen’ of the Home Guard and goes hunting to avenge this ‘ferocious carve-up’. In the jeep ‘stars tossed and righted themselves’ (an image that is lovely and accurate — as opposed to that ‘star-fretted’ sky). He gets his target in his sights, pulls the trigger (‘You got your first, sir’) and brings an abrupt end to his innocence. It isn’t long before killing is second nature to him. Foulds details his protagonist’s descent into savagery with a series of snapshot scenes and singular metaphors. It remains poetry but of the most unsettling variety: starkly beautiful language and novel wordplay employed to catalogue mankind’s recrudescent destructive tendencies; conflict realised by the graphic and the poetic. Tom reaches his nadir when he spots one of his prisoners trying to escape:

Going somewhere? Going to leave us all behind?
In his rage, he forgot his training
and beat him
not with the butt but the barrel of his gun.
He swung and swung
across the breaking stave
of the man’s forearms and collar bone
until it seemed the prisoner shivered
and gradually fell asleep,
but Tom, Tom had too much energy and carried on.

Tom, now an automaton, does not know how to stop, but fortunately his creator does. Just when the violence threatens to engulf a whole scene — even the whole poem — Foulds pans out, zooms away and returns Tom home to enjoy afternoon tea with his family.

It is a clever juxtaposition and Foulds handles quotidian normality with its air of ‘lawyerly, factual, frangible calm’ with the same aplomb as the dirty games on the battlefields. But the two worlds collide. The British home-front with its stilted conversations and starchy 1950’s manners is no polar opposite of the conflict outside because its male players use the same language whether sipping tea or shooting the enemy. These upper-crust defenders of the realm go hunting in their bow-ties; one says ‘oopsy-daisy’ when despatching a prisoner into a ditch of stakes; another, entrusted with restoring order, rapes a local girl and then says ‘No harm done. Good girl.’ Tom himself is too damaged to return to civilian life. Africa has been his ruin. He brings his rage with him to Oxford, fantasizes about beating his tutor to death (‘leaking dinges in his skull’), and is too heavy-handed during his caresses with Eleanor, a girl he has fallen for. ‘Tom. Please be nice’ she entreats him, but he has now seen too much and done too much to be nice ever again. Eleanor grants him a second chance but we are left wondering whether her love is strong enough to purify his contaminated soul, and if her ‘definite’ womanhood can mend this morally broken man. The world may well abrade our finesse but in Tom’s case it has eroded his sense of humanity.

It is a testament to Foulds’ skill as a writer that he can make a narrative poem both a visceral adrenaline-rush and an elegiac hymn on the decay of civilisation. Foulds demonstrates that it is poetry which is his forte. It runs throughout his work like a watermark, brilliantly decorating his writing but also corroborating its worth. He can take the same adjective and spin it into many singular variations. In The Truth About These Strange Times there is a scene with ‘warm furred silence’; in The Quickening Maze damp skin is ‘furred with itchy grain dust’. The fur-image is twisted yet again for The Broken Word: ‘The night getting colder, whirring, fur-trimmed with moths.’ But for all his dexterity, Foulds seems to have doubts about his artistic direction. In an interview with the The Times (UK) he said ‘I don’t really know what kind of a writer I am yet.’ These days fiction is still more likely to pay the bills than poetry, but notwithstanding this we can only hope he will not relegate his poetry to a mere side-project to his fiction. He would favor us if he finds himself siding with Byron, who, in a letter to his publisher John Murray in October 1816, confessed that ‘Poetry is — I fear — incurable.’ Adam Foulds could do a lot worse than suffer from the same ailment. He has some distance to travel in perfecting accents but in poetry he has found his true voice.