Burning Bright [Hardcover]

Tracy Chevalier (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 20, 2007

The wonderful new novel from the much loved author of 'Girl With a Pearl Earring' and 'Falling Angels'. Flames and funerals, circus feats and seduction, neighbours and nakedness: Tracy Chevalier's new novel 'Burning Bright' sparkles with drama. London 1792. The Kellaways move from familiar rural Dorset to the tumult of a cramped, unforgiving city. They are leaving behind a terrible loss, a blow that only a completely new life may soften. Against the backdrop of a city jittery over the increasingly bloody French Revolution, a surprising bond forms between Jem, the youngest Kellaway boy, and streetwise Londoner Maggie Butterfield. Their friendship takes a dramatic turn when they become entangled in the life of their neighbour, the printer, poet and radical, William Blake. He is a guiding spirit as Jem and Maggie navigate the unpredictable, exhilarating passage from innocence to experience. Their journey inspires one of Blake's most entrancing works. Georgian London is recreated as vividly in Burning Bright as 17th-century Delft was in Tracy Chevalier's bestselling masterpiece, Girl with a Pearl Earring.

--This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Author of Girl with a Pearl Earring, set in the home/studio of Vermeer, and other novels, Chevalier turns in an oblique look at poet and painter William Blake (1757–1827). Following the accidental death of their middle son, the Kellaways, a Dorsetshire chair maker and family, arrive in London's Lambeth district during the anti-Jacobin scare of 1792. Thomas Kellaway talks his way into set design work for the amiable circus impresario Philip Astley, whose fireworks displays provide the same rallying point that the guillotine is providing in Paris. Astley's libertine horseman son, John, sets his sights on Kellaway's daughter, Maisie (an attention she rather demurely returns). Meanwhile, youngest surviving Kellaway boy Jem falls for poor, sexy firebrand Maggie Butterfield. Blake, who imagined heaven and hell as equally incandescent and earth as the point where the two worlds converge, is portrayed as a murky Friar Laurence figure whose task is to bind and loosen the skeins of young love going on around him—that is, until a Royalist mob intrudes into his garden to sound out his rather advanced views on liberty, equality and fraternity. While the setting is dramatically fertile, there's no spark to the dialogue or plot, and allusions to Blake's work and themes are overbaked. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine

Tracy Chevalier's latest novel paints a colorful, compelling portrait of 18th-century London: the teeming streets, bawdy pubs, filthy factories, working-class homes, and the political unease generated by the French Revolution. Yet setting alone doesn't create a novel, and critics agree that Burning Bright lacks a compelling set of characters and, for the most part, devolves into a formulaic plot. The biggest problem is Blake himself: Chevalier never manages to successfully connect him to the young protagonists' adventures; nor does she capture Blake's psychological contradictions and depth. Entertainment and history lite, this novel "isn't exactly burning bright," concludes the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 14 and up
  
• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Dutton Adult; 1st ed. / 1st edition (March 20, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 052594978X
• ISBN-13: 978-0525949787
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (61 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #970,735 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Tracy Chevalier is the author of several bestselling novels, including the international bestseller Girl with a Pearl Earring, The Virgin Blue, Falling Angels, The Lady and the Unicorn and Burning Bright. Born in Washington, DC, she moved in 1984 to London, where she lives with her husband and son. She is Chairman of the Society of Authors.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

68 of 73 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars a strong message, March 21, 2007

By 

Richard Cumming "dick" (the heartland) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Burning Bright (Hardcover)

Chevalier sets her sights on the poet, mystic, and engraver William Blake in London during the year 1792. Blake is an odd duck. The story is told from the viewpoints of some neighbors, in particular, two families, one recently moved from the country (the INNOCENT) and a streetwise and hardened family (the EXPERIENCED).

Thus we have the metaphor for Blake's great work SONGS OF INNOCENCE AND EXPERIENCE. The French Revolution was underway and King George was terrified that his subjects would rebel against him. Mobs circulated collecting signatures on loyalty oaths. This excessive and intimidating barrage of bogus patriotism is eerily reminiscent of some of the things we saw in this country after 9/11. Do you remember all the cars with flags?

It's a lovely story and she tells it well. Is it GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING? No. Should it be? No. An author should not have to wear her most successful book like a millstone around her neck.

Enjoy it for itself.

30 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Story falls flat, March 26, 2007

By 

Kathryn Sandrew (Chicago, IL) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Burning Bright (Hardcover)

I finished this book quickly, it held my attention well enough but I kept waiting for the plot to "kick in" and it never did. The ending was a complete let down. In fact, after I read the book, I kept wondering what the point of the book was-it really wasn't about William Blake who was portrayed as more of a backdrop. It just seemed to be a a year's chronicle of a small section of neighbors in London preceding the French Revolution. Other than Maggie, the characters were flat and somewhat undeveloped...you wanted to know and care about them, but it just never happened. Extremely disappointing book from a very good writer.

23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Chevalier conjures the sights and sounds of 1792 London, May 29, 2007

By 

Bookreporter (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Burning Bright (Hardcover)

Tracy Chevalier brilliantly brought to life the 17th-century world of the Netherlands in the fictional biography of Johannes VerMeer in GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING. Now, in BURNING BRIGHT, she turns her spell-weaving skills toward painter, poet and visionary William Blake in 18th-century London.

Maisie Kellaway, daughter of a woodworker, has just moved with her older brother Jem and her parents from a North Country village to an upscale London row house owned by her father's new employer, Phillip Astley, of the famous Astley Circus. Her father, a skilled chair maker, seeks a better life for his family by working as a carpenter for the circus. Maisie is befriended by street-wise Maggie Butterfield, the daughter of a con artist and rogue who lives in a rough nearby neighborhood. Maggie is a few years older than Maisie and has her eye on Jem.

The Kellaways live next door to William Blake and his wife, who are shunned yet regarded with fearful respect by their neighbors. The story is set against the far-off rumblings of the French Revolution, a cause in which Blake seems to sympathize. As a poet and an engraver, Blake's obscure prolific publications perplex even the most erudite Englishmen, but they seem to impart the sense of lust for freedom and equality roiling on the continent that the fervid Royalists of the age see as seditious.

Maisie, Jem and Maggie begin to spend time in the Blake garden, as their landlady won't allow renters in her formal backyard. Blake does not outwardly try to influence the young people, but he and his wife encourage them to learn to read, and his poetry is all they have at hand aside from the Bible.

Blake's role in the book, while pivotal, is not as central to the story as was VerMeer's in GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING. Servitude and class distinctions are not as strictly drawn in the late 18th century as they were in the 1600s. As the 1700s draw to a close, a new awareness of the power of the masses is on the horizon. As the French Revolution grows, so does its threat of spreading to England. When Maggie's Royalist boss at the vinegar factory intimidates his employees into signing a petition in support of King George, she manages to slip away without doing so. She heads for the local pub where her mother, father and brother hang out.

The boss shows up at the pub and declares that dissenters to signing the petition are traitors to the crown and may suffer the same consequences as the French Revolutionaries if they don't support the king. When a few in the pub, including Maisie's father, stand up to the man, they are threatened with a visit to their homes. Maggie is shocked when her own father so easily bends to the will of the petitioner. She follows Maisie and her father to their home. Soon, a torch-bearing throng marches down the street where the Kellaways and Blake live. They confront Blake at his doorway, and when Blake staunchly refuses to sign, a riot breaks out. What follows seals the fate of our young heroes.

Chevalier is adept at evoking a powerful sense of time and place. In GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING, one could almost see the muted hues of the city of Delft, which so influenced VerMeer's paintings. In BURNING BRIGHT, Chevalier conjures the sights and sounds of 1792 London, shrouded in fog and coal smoke, and bustling with street vendors, charlatans, prostitutes and thieves. She captures ordinary people at the dawn of the radical changes in social, moral and political opinion that will shape the centuries to come.

--- Reviewed by Roz Shea