Burning Bright: A Novel (Paperback)

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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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From The Washington Post

Reviewed by Nicholas Delbanco

Burning Bright derives its title from the opening phrase of William Blake's great poem: "Tyger, tyger, burning bright/ In the forests of the night. . . . " When one learns that this novel's author is Tracy Chevalier, it follows as the night the day that we will enter the world of Blake's London and find "fearful symmetry" there. If not precisely formulaic, Chevalier has by now established a formula for her process and success: Take a historical period with a recognized figure or work of art, add some invented families and an engaging young person or two, do the research with specificity, and invite the reader in. Chevalier made her reputation with Girl With a Pearl Earring, the bestselling evocation of an artist's model, Griet, a 16-year-old servant in the house of Johannes Vermeer.

Chevalier, herself an American expatriate, now lives in London and takes full advantage of her knowledge of topography -- evoking the Lambeth of King George III's reign with gusto and, it would seem, precision. There are the teeming streets and bawdy chat and excursions to Soho and Westminster Abbey, the publicans and whores and pinch-faced landladies. We read of hardworking craftsmen and those who cut corners for profit; we meet the blooming country maiden whose maidenhead will not survive the rapacious courtship of a dandy. There's "Cutthroat Lane" and a city grown jittery with rumors, in 1792 and 1793, that revolutionary fervor will be imported cross-channel from France; there's the actual figure of Philip Astley, an "oversized colorful character" who created the modern circus. He swaggers persuasively through the neighborhood -- as does the corrupt Lothario on horseback, his son John. In Chevalier's list of dramatis personae, the principal players include young Jem Kellaway (fresh from Piddletrenthide and come to the big city with his parents and guileless sister) and streetwise Maggie Butterfield (who takes them under her wing but soon needs shelter herself).

Stock figures all, cut from the cloth of Daniel Defoe and Charles Dickens, and stitched together with platitudes for attitude and a scrap of song. But one of the yields of this sort of read is the vein of data mined: We learn how to make Dorsetshire buttons and Windsor chairs, and it doesn't matter all that much if the artisans who fashion them are less than three-dimensional. The language is alternately casual ("Anne Kellaway snorted, trying to mask the laugh that had begun to bubble up") and forced ("He turned his intense gaze on Jem, who looked back at him, though it hurt, the way staring at the sun does, for the man's glittering eyes cut through whatever mask Jem had donned to go this deep into London").

At the novel's center stands the poet and painter of the "intense gaze," William Blake. His is a difficult presence to parse, though we do learn of his habit of lying naked in the garden with his wife, of his pleasure in reciting Milton and his skill with printing press and etcher's plate. We hear him talk to his dead brother and watch him while he draws. A recent biographer, Peter Ackroyd, reports on Blake's argument with Philip Astley (who had attached a log to a boy's leg and made him drag it on parade), and Chevalier brings that scene to fictive life. But she is somewhat less clear as to why Blake would engage the children in long colloquies on the nature of perception and existence, then press upon them his own copies of Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. Implausibly, predictably, young Jem and Maggie agree at tale's end that London and Piddletrenthide belong together:

" 'So if I'm on this side o' the fence, and you're on t'other, what's in the middle?'

"Jem put his hand on the stile. 'We are.' "

If you believe in urchins happily united in the country dusk and reciting Blake to each other, then this book will persuade. Chevalier's villains are deep-dyed villains, her good people blindingly good; they go from innocence to experience with scarcely a hitch in their stride.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Plume; 1st Thus. edition (February 26, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0452289076
• ISBN-13: 978-0452289079
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.3 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (50 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #346,575 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

51 of 56 people found the following review helpful:

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

By	Richard Cumming "richo" (cyberspace) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

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.

20 of 21 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.

12 of 12 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.com (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