Burning Bright

Jill Tanner's repertoire of accents delineates characters of various ages and social classes in the story of three children growing up in the streets of Georgian London, under the spell of Astley's Circus and poet William Blake. Jem and Maisie Kellaway move to the city with their furniture-making father after their brother dies in an accident. There they meet Maggie, a girl who shepherds them through the wilds of the city. As the three grow from innocence into experience, parallels to Blake's words are powerful. Chevalier's descriptions of the city almost turn the setting into a character. The descriptions and Tanner's strong reading keep listeners involved in a book without a strong plot. S.W. (c) AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine

December 18, 2006
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.