Burning Bright by Tracy Chevalier

Hmmm. I like Tracy Chevalier, I particularly enjoyed The Girl With A Pearl Earring. I was intrigued by this as it was a move away from art and over to literature, taking William Blake as its subject.

According to the Daily Express it's "an ambitious, impressively researched novel" and I feel sure it was, the bibliography would seem to testify to this at least. However, there was disappointingly little Blake it in.

I learned a lot about Dorset button styles, mustard factories and chair making, I also learned a bit about the attitudes in London at the time towards the French Revolution. But, I didn't really understand what William Blake had to do with it all.

He was the neighbour of the main protagonists and did appear in the story, but it seemed almost too token to make much difference. He may have been the original inspiration for the novel, but I felt he ended up as an incidental character, almost an unnecessary aside to the rest of the plot.

Maybe I'm being too harsh. Maybe Blake is a notoriously difficult character to research as so little is known about him. Maybe what Tracy Chevalier has done is breathe life into a hitherto shady 2 dimensional character. However, I suspect not.

By far the most interesting thing for me in this whole flimsy and rather unnecessary tale was the depiction of London in the late 1700s. I love the thought of living in Lambeth village, or being able to look across the fields to the Thames and Westminster bridge, or to travel north into the countryside to visit Hampstead.

I spend a lot of time for work in Thurrock at the moment, that area on the north bank of the Thames in what has become known at the 'Thames Gateway'. This area is the largest regeneration site in Europe and as such will become a building site for much of the next 15 years as thousands of new homes and the accompanying infrastructure is built all over it. It is currently a very green, strangely rural place where it is indeed possible to stand and look over fields to the Thames Estuary – not, I fear, for much longer...