Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #108235 in Books
• Published on: 2007-03-05
• Binding: Hardcover
• 400 pages

Bookseller
`Eagerly awaited.'

Synopsis
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.

From the Author
THE INSPIRATION: In early 2001 I went to an exhibition of
William Blake's works at Tate Britain in London. This sprawling display
explored the many and varied strands of Blake's life: his paintings,
commercial engravings, books he printed and coloured, illustrated poems,
and prose and letters describing his radical thinking and bohemian world.

I was familiar with Blake's poems from studying them at college, and his
art from a semester I spent studying in London, but I had never seen it all
pulled together. I remember standing in the middle of one of the rooms,
bewildered by the variety and intensity of his work, and thinking, "This
guy was crazy, or on drugs, or both." At the end of the exhibition, I went
into the shop and bought a notebook with a Blake image on the cover,
thinking, "This is the notebook I will use for my Blake novel some day."
Two and a half years later, I opened that notebook and began taking notes.

I spent a whole year reading about Blake and looking at his work before I
began the novel itself. There is so much written about him it's kind of
ridiculous, and confusing. I think Blake is a bit of a mirror - hold him up
to yourself and you will see reflected in him your own interests and
preoccupations. Poetry, art, philosophy, theology, erotica, politics,
socio-economics: it's all there if you choose to look for it.

Blake's work is not easy to cope with. Much of his poetry is long,
personal, and obscure. His illustrations are dark and anxious. By the end
of the year I didn't understand him any better than I had at the start -
though I did at least come to realize that he was neither crazy nor on
drugs. I kept looking for that one work that would explain him to me, but
after a while I realized I was going to have to write it myself.

The works I kept coming back to were his two volumes, Songs of Innocence
and of Experience - short, simple poems I had always loved and felt I sort
of understood. I decided then that I would focus on Blake's writing of
Songs of Experience - to me the acquiring of experience contains more of a
story than being in a state of innocence. The story of Adam and Eve is
interesting because they tasted the apple, after all; otherwise there is no
story.

Speaking of Adam and Eve, I also kept circling back to a story told about
Blake and his wife Catherine. Supposedly their friend Thomas Butts visited
them in Lambeth and found them sitting naked in their garden, reading
Milton's Paradise Lost to each other. Blake is meant to have said, "Oh,
don't mind us - it's only Adam and Eve, you know!" Scholars dismiss the
story as unlikely, but I love it, as it humanizes Blake. It also made me
wonder what it was like to be his neighbor. So I put that together with
Songs of Experience and came up with Burning Bright.

Customer Reviews

Neither burning nor bright
Girl With A Pearl Earring gave an insight into Vermeer's life, working methods and the period in which he lived. Burning Bright, on the other hand, imparts very little about Blake, other than to recite excerpts from some of his works. The main story line revolves around Jem and Maggie, who wander around the streets of London a lot. Does one really get a feel for 'a city jittery over the increasingly bloody French Revolution' ? Grimy streets - yes, political atmosphere - no (except for one mob outside Blake's front door one night). As for Jem & Maggie's tale, one finishes the book thinking what was the point of this book.

Don't take this book on holiday
Don't make the mistake I did and take this book on holiday. Depressing, shallow and seemingly written by a ten-year old, this will make your holiday memorable for all the wrong reasons. I perservered to the end hoping it would get better, as I couldn't believe it was written by the same author as Girl With A Pearl Earring and The Virgin Blue. Unfortunately it was a complete waste of time and I came away with nothing but the embarrassment of having read some kind of children's book. Two dimensional characters that I learned nothing about, nor did I care. It's as if Tracy Chevalier has got bored of writing but Harper Collins wanted to squeeze one more historical novel out of her. I would have been ashamed to put my name to this book.

For an antidote try reading Notes From An Exhibition by Patrick Gale.

Disappointing
This story is set in 18th century London and supposedly revolves around two children and the erudite figure of William Blake. One is struck with a certain authenticity in the way in which Chevalier writes, and there is very little against her quality of writing. The problem lies in her subject matter.

On the back of the cover it explains how the book is "Sparkling with seduction...drama", yet the drama that does come along is brief and shortlived. The action usually happens to her main children characters, but the way in which she describes these rare scenes of action is such that she almost treats her reader as a child.

And there in lies her main fault. The mark of a good story is registered not by how much is said, but by how much is not said, leaving the rest for the reader to make the connection. Chevalier does not leave enough to the reader to work out, and the mind switches off. She has become so absorbed with her characters and eighteenth century London that she has completely forgotten and disregarded her reader, leaving an empty, boring shell of a story to merely pass the time before her next novel.

Disappointing from an author of such quality.