Burning Bright, Tracy Chevalier
I wanted to like this book, truly I did. Tracy Chevalier is a writer of historical fiction, best known for The Girl with a Pearl Earring, which I greatly enjoyed, but I haven't liked any of her works as well since.
Her current novel is set in London's Lambeth neighborhood, across the Thames from Westminster--a geographic juxtaposition of the underclass and the ruling class. Chevalier's intrigued by opposites throughout the novel, but she has another reason for choosing Lambeth: William Blake and his wife lived here, hence the reference to "The Tyger" in the title. That poem is from his Songs of Experience (1793) and mirrors "The Lamb" in Songs of Innocence (1789), so there we have our second pair of opposites in the novel (really more of a dialectic in the way Blake frames the comparison). Generally, "The Tyger" is interpreted in a religious context, as part of Blake's mystical mythology and as a question about why god would create such ferocity. But the more germane subtext here is political: this poem was published in 1794, five years after the outset of the French Revolution (and Songs of Innocence) and contemporary with the Reign of Terror, which ended with the death of the Robespierre in 1794. Blake--a radical, a friend to Thomas Paine, and a supporter of both American and French revolutions who was disillusioned by the bloodbath that the latter became--was probably casting the French people in the role of the tiger, magnificent but also agents of "deadly terrors"; hence the tiger's dialectic is a "fearful symmetry." Burning Bright is set just before the Reign of Terror, in 1792-1793, when the English, fearing for their own monarchy, fueled anti-Jacobin hysteria in Britain.
That period of revolution and the character of William Blake are fascinating subjects; unfortunately, they're barely present in the novel. Instead, enter the Dorset set, the Kellaway family, recently arrived from the countryside after a son's tragic accident. These country cousins offer a wide-eyed perspective on 18th century London, enabling Chevalier to talk about the city's geography, trades, and customs, and she does seem to get the details right. I particularly liked some of the sections about Philip Astley's circus, which was real and located in Lambeth. As characters go, however, they're a bit central-casting, and it took me a long time to get past the Dorsetshire accent. Now, I have nothing against the West Country--the region has produced some damned fine cheeses (especially cheddar) and the excellent comedian Bill Bailey (who was disappointed not to get a role in Lord of the Rings, particularly after he saw the movies and discovered that the hobbits had West Country accents like his). But when the novel's Londoners were speaking more-or-less contemporary English and the Dorset crowd were speaking in rube-ified dialect, I found it hard to focus on the characters' mindset and was instead reminded of a book Paul Collins described in Sixpence House:
I do not see much of a future for the peculiarly misbegotten 1937 project by J. Barlow Brooks, Th' Amazin' Stories o' the Bible: I' th' Lankisher Dialect. If you would like to imagine God Almighty addressing Archangel Raphael in the persona of a farmer up to his wellies in pig slop, Mr. Barlow is happy to oblige: "If Aw we thee, Rafe, Aw'd stop wittherin'! What yo' Ark-angils need to larn's a bit o' patience."
I suspect Chevalier was going for Dickensian. Dickens was a great perambulator, walking every neighborhood of London, absorbing everything like a sponge, and then wringing all that life back onto the page--the splendor and squalor alike, in fantastic detail. But though Dickens could be sentimental and over-the-top, he was also quite sincere, and I think you can't reproduce that authenticity when you're trying to imitate or to pay homage, nor can you replace his first-hand experience with, well, book-larnin'.
So, beyond the city descriptions, what we have at the center of the novel is a courtship between country boy and city girl, periodically peppered by encounters with their neighbor, Mr. Blake. He seems to pop up whenever Chevalier needs a smidgeon of poetry to make her point, like how these young innocents are becoming experienced for better and for worse. Using Blake as seasoning for this rather bland romance is, of course the exact opposite (whoops!) of what the author should be doing: serving up the poet as the main dish and revealing how the other characters are some of the raw ingredients of his art. That's precisely what she did in The Girl with a Pearl Earring, show us Vermeer's home life and work through the eyes of the serving girl, Griet, and thereby giving some real (fictional) insight into artistic process and appreciation of the paintings. The Lady and the Unicorn did that as well, to a lesser extent, and at least got me excited to see the unicorn tapestries at the Cluny Museum. But here in Burning Bright, both the art and the process of making it are scantly described--all we learn about engraving a plate, for example, is that text was etched in with acid, the words written backwards--and those finished poems are stitched in like a bad graft. Honestly, I was more engaged by the descriptions of Dorsetshire button-making and Windsor-chair-making. So, forget about Blake the character and stick with Blake the poet and artist; you'll enjoy him a lot more.
