Skip to main content

Review: The Piano Tuner by Daniel Mason

Originally published in July 2005, on my original 52 Books blog. This is the final review repost.

In 1886, Edgar Drake, a specialist in tuning Erard pianos, is sent by the British War Office to the wilds of Burma to tune an Erard for Surgeon-Major Carroll, a man who has managed to become perhaps the most important British officer in the whole of Burma by making himself indispensable for the peace negotiations between the British and the Burmese. The piano plays some mysterious part in all this, but has unfortunately reacted badly to the extremes of the climate and is out of tune. Drake, shy, thoughtful and eccentric, finds in himself an unexpected adventurousness as he sets off from England to tune the piano. Once he gets to Carroll’s stronghold in Mae Lwin, he is enchanted by the place, charmed by Carroll, and seduced (not in the physical sense) by a mysterious local woman. All of these unite in holding him there, and he loses all sense of time and sinks into a kind of dream. When reality finally invades, it becomes doubtful if he will ever return to England and his beloved wife.

This is a beautiful and melancholy story. Mason has a talent for describing landscapes and people in flowing and evocative prose, and it has been a long time since I read anything as cinematic as this book. In some strange way I can not quite define, I felt this was a very English book, although the author is an American. He perfectly describes the attitudes and arrogance of the British towards the Burmese people, for example in the chapters about Drake’s journey and the British officers he meets - especially a very tragic tiger hunt he unwillingly joins. The first half of the story is about Drake’s journey from England to Mae Lwin, and the second is about his stay there and the tuning of the piano. The story is very slow and flowing, right down to the last chapters, when it suddenly picks up, with unnecessary suddenness, and becomes a thriller. There is hardly any build-up to the action, and the ending, although apt, is too abrupt.
I did feel that I couldn’t quite sympathise with Drake, or indeed any other character. They are all described from the outside, as if the author was describing something he was seeing on a movie screen in front of him, rather than actually being there. There is always a distance between the reader and the characters, a distance you want to bridge, but can’t, because there is something lacking in the telling of their story. This distant, at times almost clinical viewing of the characters, is a big flaw, and prevents the book from making my favourites list.

All in all, I would say this is a very good first novel, but has flaws that Mason will hopefully not repeat in his next novel.

Rating: A beautiful and tragic story of one man’s adventure of a lifetime. 3+ stars.

Excerpt from The Piano Tuner.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Book 40: The Martian by Andy Weir, audiobook read by Wil Wheaton

Note : This will be a general scattershot discussion about my thoughts on the book and the movie, and not a cohesive review. When movies are based on books I am interested in reading but haven't yet read, I generally wait to read the book until I have seen the movie, but when a movie is made based on a book I have already read, I try to abstain from rereading the book until I have seen the movie. The reason is simple: I am one of those people who can be reduced to near-incoherent rage when a movie severely alters the perfectly good story line of a beloved book, changes the ending beyond recognition or adds unnecessarily to the story ( The Hobbit , anyone?) without any apparent reason. I don't mind omissions of unnecessary parts so much (I did not, for example, become enraged to find Tom Bombadil missing from The Lord of the Rings ), because one expects that - movies based on books would be TV-series long if they tried to include everything, so the material must be pared down

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove

First book of 2020: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel by Deborah Moggach (reading notes)

I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but I loathe movie tie-in book covers because I feel they are (often) trying to tell me how I should see the characters in the book. The edition of Deborah Moggach's These Foolish Things that I read takes it one step further and changes the title of the book into the title of the film version as well as having photos of the ensemble cast on the cover. Fortunately it has been a long while since I watched the movie, so I couldn't even remember who played whom in the film, and I think it's perfectly understandable to try to cash in on the movie's success by rebranding the book. Even with a few years between watching the film and reading the book, I could see that the story had been altered, e.g. by having the Marigold Hotel's owner/manager be single and having a romance, instead being of unhappily married to an (understandably, I thought) shrewish wife. It also conflates Sonny, the wheeler dealer behind the retireme