MANY will be familiar with Chevalier's previous novel named for the famous Vermeer painting around which it is based, Girl with A Pearl Earring. This new novel is instead built around a poet, William Blake. However, he has a bit part, albeit a very important one.

The novel concentrates on two of Blake's subjects, Maggie and Jem. It begins with 12-year-old Jem's journey from the countryside to the city of London with his family. The family has recently suffered the loss of Jem's older brother, who died falling out of a pear tree in their back garden.

As a result, his father, a quiet chairmaker, and his matriarchal mother decide to move Jem and his sister Maisie to Lambeth.

Jem's father soon gets a job and lodgings for the family courtesy of the local circus entrepreneur, Philip Astley.

Neighbourhood magpie Maggie wastes no time coming to sniff around the new family to see what they are about. She begins to form a friendship with Jem based initially on their mutual fascination with his enigmatic neighbours, William Blake and his wife.

Set against the backdrop of an England torn between loyal monarchists and a growing number of supporters for French revolutionists who believe a republic is better for more of its countrymen, the novel moves excruciatingly slowly.

Blake steps out wearing the bonne rouge - a red hat associated with sympathisers of the French revolution - and cements the young couple's fascination with him, ultimately leading to their mutual introduction.

Jem and Maggie become subjects of Blake as his interest in them almost matches their own in him.

As the novel wends its way through Blake's poverty-stricken, abused and depressed London of 1792, Chevalier's descriptions of characters and scenes are potent.

All this excellent characterisation is nonetheless frustrating because it is at the expense of the storyline, which plods agonisingly through Jem's and Maggie's budding romance, Maisie's adulation of the womaniser John Astley (heir to the circus) and Maggie's troubled relationship with her con-man father and delinquent brother.

It is only when the story gets to October 1792, the last third of the book, that the plot begins to catch up with itself and everything starts to happen.

The monarchists begin rounding on those they perceive as revolutionary sympathisers, bringing a mob to Blake's front door and interrogating him on his doorstep.

Although we have caught glimpses of Blake's politics throughout the book, it is confined to Jem's and Maggie's uneducated eyes and, for all but the keenest Blake scholar, there was too little defined about the great poet and thinker, leaving his clearly great character somehow unfulfilled.

Both Jem and Maggie are more clearly drawn, as are their families, so that their complexities and differences finally make for fascinating storytelling.

Preferably this novel would have begun with the final third of the book and taken the characters onwards from there. Whilst Chevalier's attempt to portray London and England through Blake's eyes is effective, her storytelling suffers for it.