Guardian Review

In Girl with a Pearl Earring , Tracy Chevalier constructed her story around the famous, and famously elusive, Vermeer portrait of the same name. In her new novel, Burning Bright , she pursues similar themes, inspired this time by the poetry of William Blake. Like Vermeer, Blake struggled to make a living, and it was only after his death that the extent of his talents was fully appreciated. Blake was a religious visionary and mystic, a supporter of free love and an outspoken critic of the political reaction in England to the French revolution, and his views were regarded, during his lifetime, as at best eccentric and by many as downright treasonable. It is not difficult to understand his appeal to the historical novelist. As in her earlier novel, Chevalier has chosen to focus not on the artist himself but upon those who observe and admire him. Girl with a Pearl Earring is written from the perspective of Griet, a maidservant who sits as model for the portrait. In Burning Bright the youthful eyes are those of Jem and Maisie Kellaway, new to London from Dorsetshire, and Maggie Butterfield, a streetwise Lambeth girl of the same age. In both novels, Chevalier is preoccupied primarily with the loss of childish innocence and with the role of great art in that process. Those who admired Chevalier's atmospheric evocation of 17th- century Delft will find much to enjoy in her vivid reconstruction of late 18th-century London. She is clearly intoxicated by the clamour and roar of the city, and the novel brims with descriptive detail, from the wild feats of Astley's Circus to the grim poverty of the slums of St Giles, from the art of Dorset button-making to the mournful procession of a funeral cortege. This broad canvas, however, brings its own difficulties. In Girl with a Pearl Earring , set in the main in the claustrophobic intensity of the artist's house, the atmosphere is miniaturist and built up like paint, layer upon layer. In Burning Bright , Chevalier has created a story which, like the raucous panorama of London against which it is set, is broad and busy, its focus shifting restlessly between its many characters. There is a great deal of action and drama - in the course of the novel we are witness to rape, murder and a triumvirate of shameful pregnancies, not to mention the hair-raising feats of the circus and a blaze in a house filled with fireworks - but the plot that brings them together never quite catches light. The heavy accumulation of historical detail is insufficiently balanced with the weight of the story itself. Instead the reader's attention is rapidly drawn from one place to another, diffusing emotion and spreading the characters too thin. As for Blake himself, his relation ship with the young protagonists of the story is slight and unsatisfactory. It is of course difficult to express externally the essentially solitary and silent business of writing. Chevalier writes in detail about the printing process, but the manufacture of the poems themselves is not so easy to evoke. Her attempts to demonstrate the development of Blake's ideas during conversations with the children are stilted and artificially theoretical. And, although she endeavours to create connections between the maturation of her teenaged protagonists and the corrupting influence of the world explored in Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience , they add little to the reader's perception of either the novel's characters or Blake's most celebrated works. Blake was an angry revolutionary, opposed to all forms of society that mortified, constricted or denied the individuality of the human spirit. Chevalier quotes often from "London", a bitter and harsh view of the city, in which Blake represents even the new-born infant, traditionally a symbol of hope, as the offspring of an adolescent prostitute, blighted by venereal disease; but although the seamier side of the city is certainly represented in Burning Bright , her novel ultimately ducks this darkness, securing happy endings for even the most desperate of its characters. Tormented always by the man-made abyss that, to him, separated reality from the ideal, Blake would surely not have approved. Clare Clark's latest novel is The Nature of Monsters (Viking). To order Burning Bright for pounds 14.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop Caption: article-Fiction5.1 [William Blake] was an angry revolutionary, opposed to all forms of society that mortified, constricted or denied the individuality of the human spirit. [Tracy Chevalier] quotes often from "London", a bitter and harsh view of the city, in which Blake represents even the new-born infant, traditionally a symbol of hope, as the offspring of an adolescent prostitute, blighted by venereal disease; but although the seamier side of the city is certainly represented in Burning Bright , her novel ultimately ducks this darkness, securing happy endings for even the most desperate of its characters. Tormented always by the man-made abyss that, to him, separated reality from the ideal, Blake would surely not have approved. - Clare Clark.