The Burning Book

by Maggie Gee

Book by Gee, Maggie

Genres: Fiction, Novels

304 pages, Hardcover

First published September 19, 1983

About the author

Maggie Gee is an English novelist. She was born in Poole, Dorset, then moved to the Midlands and later to Sussex. She was educated at state schools and at Oxford University (MA, B Litt). She later worked in publishing and then had a research post at Wolverhampton Polytechnic where she completed the department's first PhD. She has written eleven novels and a collection of short stories, and was the first female Chair of the Royal Society of Literature, 2004-2008. She is now one of the Vice-Presidents of the RSL and Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Sheffield Hallam University. She has also served on the Society of Authors' management committee and the government's Public Lending Right committee. Her seventh novel, The White Family, was shortlisted for the 2003 Orange Prize and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

She writes in a broadly modernist tradition, in that her books have a strong overall sense of pattern and meaning, but her writing is characterised by political and social awareness. She turns a satirical eye on contemporary society but is affectionate towards her characters and has an unironised sense of the beauty of the natural world. Her human beings are biological as well as social creatures, partly because of the influence of science and in particular evolutionary biology on her thinking. Where are The Snows, The Ice People and The Flood have all dealt with the near or distant future. She writes through male characters as often as she does through female characters.

The individual human concerns that her stories address include the difficulties of resolving the conflict between total unselfishness, which often leads to secret unhappiness and resentment against the beneficiaries, and selfishness, which can lead to the unhappiness of others, particularly of children. This is a typical quandary of late-20th and early-21st-century women, but it is also a concern for privileged, wealthy, long-lived western human beings as a whole, and widens into global concerns about wealth and poverty and climate change. Her books also explore how the human species relates to non-human animals and to the natural world as a whole. Two of her books, The White Family and My Cleaner, have had racism as a central theme, dealt with as a tragedy in The White Family but as a comedy in My Cleaner. She is currently writing a memoir called My Animal Life. In 2009 she published "My Driver", a second novel with many of the same characters as My Cleaner, but this time set in Uganda during a time of tension with neighbouring DRC Congo.

Maggie Gee lives in London with her husband, the writer and broadcaster Nicholas Rankin, an author, and their daughter Rosa.

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls]

The threat of nuclear extinction is once more casting a pall over our fracturing and frightening world. Maggie Gee’s brilliant 1983 novel is a powerful reminder that the horror of Hiroshima must never take place again. A tremendously intimate family epic, The Burning Book navigates three generations of two families, with Lorna and Henry—two working class parents from Acton—at the centre, as Gee explores the familial conflicts, failures to love, and the slow drifting disappointments within their lives. An impending nuclear catastrophe is alluded to throughout the novel, with references to the sufferings of Hiroshima, leading to a devastating climax written in fragments of broken Beckettian poetry. The picture Gee paints of the family is fairly melancholy, her tone compassionate and humorous, and a slight narrative distance is taken in full knowledge of her poor characters’ fates.

[Eleanor]

I’ve never been more conflicted on a book. Obviously the themes are meant to be discursive, but it’s also my thoughts on the quality of the book. On the one hand, it does some very clever things. Some of the writing is beautiful. At other parts it sparks visceral cringe within me. It is somehow so self-aware and yet also infuriatingly blind and self-righteous. It is problematic but goes almost to the point of being aware of itself as a constructed gaze…and then goes too far and crosses into the realm of the problematic again. It speaks silently about things and yet also overwrites and says too much. It doesn’t trust its own form enough, and yet it is often egotistically confident in its own cleverness.

[Erin]

*3.5*

Really grew on me a lot towards the ending. Might have to reread this one day and hopefully I will like it more then.

[Melissa]

I read this book when I was in high school and it still remains one of the best, beautifully written books I have ever read

[Keith Miller]

Burning Book by Maggie Gee (1984)

[Milly]

I read this when I was 15 and I never forgot.

[Alice]

Breathtaking, raw and beautiful. This one will stay with me. Want to read more Maggie Gee NOW!