Customer Reviews

The Piano Tuner

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Was Edgar Drake a hapless foil? Was he really mixed up in espionage, codes and a plot against his own government? The reader must decide. Nonetheless the reader's trip from England to Burma is an exotic, engaging one. Edgar, a devout piano tuner, is summoned by the military to make an arduous trip to Burma to tune an Erard, an instrument that is to the piano what the Stradivarius is to the violin. He's honored that his reputation is so sterling that he willingly undertakes the mysterious journey in what he believes is in service to his queen, leaving behind a loving wife to whom he is equally devoted.

The story takes place in the 1800s. Britain, as a colonialist country, has laid claim to portions of India and Burma and is fighting multiple (Burmese) regional princes who are not about to willingly give up their country or their way of life.

As Edgar travels by train and boat, he's fascinated by his novel surroundings. Rather than passing judgment on the different food and customs and beliefs he encounters, Edgar is smitten. Finally, he meets the mysterious Surgeon-Major Anthony J. Carroll, who is so important to the English that they would accede to the unusual request for both the Erard and a piano tuner who must put it right because of the piano's own perilous trip, Burma's humidity, plus having been through a full on military attack by an enemy!

Enter a beautiful woman. She is intelligent, attentive to Edgar, escorts him about the mountainous environs where Carroll is in charge, introduces him to the local flora and lore. What the mysterious Khin Myo's relationship is to Carroll is speculative but her importance is obvious and she is omnipresent.

Carroll appears to be the antithesis of the British conqueror and introduces a fascinated Edgar to the small medical clinic he has founded where he assists the local people as best he can using both meager supplies of western medicine, as well as blends of herbs from the local area. Carroll is an avid scientist and social scientist. He has studied malaria, for example, although he has no archives to search or modern day medical journals, he's surmised that it is a mosquito that bears the disease.

The good doctor is also well schooled in local myth and lore and uses his ample negotiating skills to make peace with the local warlords. He's convinced he can bring about peace without firepower. Music is also a preferred tool to his anticipated peaceful outcome. Edgar is fascinated and Carroll completely wins him over.

However, over time the doctor seems to elevate Edgar's role from piano tuner to one involved in bringing about peace to the area. Edgar is perceptively unwilling to return to England and the western ways. This proves his undoing.

The beautiful Khin Myo's allure is fundamental to Edgar's remaining with the Shan people. The relationship remains chaste but promising? Then everything falls apart and Edgar is accused of being the doctor's accomplice in betraying his country. To describe the plot more is to spoil the journey for the reader.

The author is impressive in his storytelling, although parts of the tale are slow moving...perhaps intentionally. Especially in the descriptions of Edgar's journey to Burma. Nonetheless his research into the country, its history, its music, its lore is certainly evident. Finally, the descriptions of the Erard, of the tools of piano tuning, as well as the painstaking process in tuning a piano are just as impressive!

Author Daniel Mason's debut novel tells the tale of Edgar Drake, an English piano tuner who specializes in working with Érards, upscale French instruments. One day out of the blue Drake receives a mysterious summons to tune an Érard belonging to Anthony Carroll, a British Army surgeon stationed in an unstable region of colonial Burma, and off he goes.

Mason has done his research--the descriptions of a lost, exotic land and its people are poetically evocative and cry out for visual realization (David Lean, where are you when we need you?). He also demonstrates a considerable knowledge of the workings of the British Army, colonial Burmese history and culture, and piano technology. All of this background, as fascinating as it is, frankly overwhelms the slow-paced, slender plot, which takes more than one hundred pages to bring Drake and the mysterious Dr. Carroll together. Along the way the hero meets the obligatory exotic heroine, in this case a beautiful and educated servant of Carroll's named Khin Myo, but the affair remains tastefully chaste. If one hangs with "The Piano Tuner" there is a surprise twist and an unexpected, tragic denouement that grip the reader at the eleventh hour; but the time and number of words it takes to get there suggests Mason, as beautiful and atmospheric as his writing can be, needs to work more on his sense of pacing and proportion.

A quiet, bespectacled, home-bound English piano tuner is sent into the wide, wonderful, exotic world of 1886 in this outstanding first novel by Daniel Mason. Specifically, his job is to repair an out-of-tune piano which has somehow preceded him into the jungly wilderness of Burma, but in general he experiences the world as it was then, particularly that part of it at the furthest outpost of the British Empire. Thanks to the author's careful attention to detail, derived unquestionably from his own overawed sense of wonder, we get to experience it too.

With the piano tuner, Edgar Drake, we see the coast of Africa one hot morning off the starboard side of his ship; we sail through the Red Sea; we disembark in Bombay, then make the overland journey across India; and finally there is Burma from Rangoon to Mandalay to the final destination in the wilds of the Shan states, Mae Lwin.

Mae Lwin, with its children playing in the river, its tattooed men, its women with their strangely beautiful, lined "thanaka" make-up. Mae Lwin, built on the side of a mountain, with stairs slanting everywhere connecting its buildings. Mae Lwin, surrounded by a jungle filled with butterflies, flowers, snakes, mosquitoes, heat, sheeting rain, and various birds such as parrots, mynah birds and kingfishers. It is so exotic that we, like our besotted piano tuner, become enraptured by it.

But beyond this the novel is a pretty good intrigue also. The British, you see, had to be concerned with the French incursion into Indo-China, and also the never-ending Russian menace. The fierce Han warriors in the region had to be subdued either through alliance or war. Our piano tuner, summoned to Burma for a reason, suddenly finds that piano tuning is only one of the missions in which he is to engage.

There is also the beautiful and delicate Khin Myo, who initially is his guide, but who eventually becomes something much more to him. "Stay away from matters of love," his superior tells him.

Finally, with the exotic locale as its backdrop, the plot functions as a metaphor for the journey we sometimes take outside ourselves. The search for beauty and truth is not always a straightforward and easy one; there are many distractions along the way. Indeed, the signs can be confusing, and one can become lost.

This excellent novel exhibits a bit of clumsiness here and there, particularly with some early narrative exposition, but on the whole this is a fine, well-written, almost lyrical first effort. May there be more.

A Great first Novel!
I was lucky to pick up an advanced copy of this first novel at the library. It caught my attention with its subject matter as I had just read'Tournament of Shadows' by Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Brysac about the history of the 'great game' in Central Asia (a great non-fiction book). I found the Piano Tuner's adventure story and it telling against the roll of the British Army in the jungles of Burma an interesting backdrop to this novel set in the late 1800s. The Piano Tuner is going to be a big hit! It is so well written, filled with great visuals and as the Piano Tuner, Edgar Drake, travels from London to Burma just to tune a mysterious piano for a mysterious officer. It's basic structure reads like 'Heart of Darkness'. I really enjoyed this first novel. (I am sure Mr. Daniel Mason will not be able to complete medical school as we will all want to read his next book.) Now I wonder who will make this into a movie.. I see Ralph Fines in the lead.

In October 1886, about a year after the British invaded and took over the lower region of Burma, a shy and modest piano tuner Edgar Drake received a strange request from the British War Office. The Crown had requested of his immediate service in repairing an Erard grand piano thousands of miles away, its soundboard swollen and miserably out of tune. He was to leave his wife and his quiet life in London to travel to the jungles of Burma; settled deep in a country that was almost too dangerous for a civilian deprived of any military training. The piano belonged to one Surgeon-Major Anthony Carroll who had requested the piano 30 some years earlier and threatened to resign from service had the acquisition not granted by the Crown. The irreplaceable doctor, whose eccentric peace-making strategies comprised of poetry, medicine and music, despite much disapproval and jeering from contemporaries, had mitigated tension in Burma and brought a tentative quiet to the south Shan states.

Though the request for piano repair in war states was strange and incredulous, the premise of the debut novel is tantalizing enough to elicit interest to move on as Edgar Drake embarked on his journey to the Far East. The first part of the novel detailed his journey through Europe, the Suez Canal, the Red Sea, India, then into Burma - but still that was not it as Drake had to venture into the jungle, almost in dugout, from Rangoon to the distant fort of Mae Lwin. The encounter with officers whom he had always mistrusted, Burmese, bandits, and soothsayers further intensify the suspense of what Drake might expect at his destination, and accentuate his thirst for the damaged piano.

Author Daniel Mason, who had spent a year studying malaria on the Thai-Myanmar border, where much was the book was written, delivers an absorbing story of a world in transition, through vicissitude, enlivened through characters who loved music and peace and suffer from warfare with equal intensity. The book delineates the complicated cross-currents of emerging espionage, the British contention with the Limbin Confederacy, the consolidation forces of French forces in Indo-China, and local insurgence that threatened British hold of remote regions.

Though not as rich and layered an epic as The Glass Palace, The Piano Tuner subtlety probes the meaning of identity of homeland. To Edgar Drake, it was his duty to the piano and not the Crown and he what mattered the most was that he could help in the cause of music. While at one point he felt disconcerted at the delay of repair and his hope began to vanished, he also felt like Odysseus who could no longer return home after witnessing all the wonders of a country which he struggled to eke out an inkling of understanding. The Piano Tuner is a memorable tale of one man's journey to self-discovery and passion.

2004 (16) © MY

Daniel Mason has written an amazingly sensitive drama of a time when the British extended their Asian empire at the end of the 19th century. An eccentric army doctor has successfully established the farthest outpost in the Shan States, east of Burma. He has now sent a most unusual request to British headquarters.
Mason shows us Asia as seen through the eyes of Edgar Drake, a mild-mannered piano tuner who never before ventured outside England. He lets us to absorb the exotic local scenes slowly, one by one, as Edgar accustoms himself first to the colonial British, then to Burma, and finally to the culture of the untamed Shan Plateau and its rulers, and the outpost of Mae Lwin.
It is hard to realize that the young author has gathered his knowledge from only a year on the Thai-Burma border. Mason has an extraordinary eye for detail, and a hypnotic narrative style that can blend dream with delirium with enchantment.
The pace is slow at times. But that is the nature of Burma, where one must wait for the rains, wait for an official's decision, and wait for the right moment to act.

Some stories possess the ability to awaken one's soul and make it grin.

This is one of those stories.

This mustard-colored book jacket caught my eye and made me examine the contents. Late 19th century Burma? Hmmm, probably not my cup of tea. For some reason, however, I purchased the book anyway. And I was instantaneously transformed, embossed, impressed.

It's magic.

I turned the last page only to realize hours had passed in a flash--I had journeyed to another world and my own stopped momentarily. I recommend this book completely--it's my favorite book to date.

Edgar Drake is a quiet, middle-aged piano tuner in Victorian London with a nice job, a nice house and a good marriage when he receives an unusual commission: the British War Office asks him to travel to the Burmese jungle to tune the precious grand piano of a slightly eccentric, but very important, medical doctor, who is capable of arranging peace with the rebelling princes of the Shan states. After a trip that brings Edgar, who has never left England before, to exotic places like Alexandria, Aden en India, he arrives in Burma, where everything is different. But somehow he seems to cope very well, really eager to learn the habits of the country and its people.When the trip to his final destination, Mae Lwin, is endlessly postponed for unknown reasons, he travels illegally to the idyllic hamlet. He meets the doctor and his lovely Burmese girlfriend, tunes the piano and gets caught up in political intrigues that he cannot begin to fathom. In the end his love for Burma leads to his downfall.

A beautifully written book, lovely to read about Burma and amazing that a young American writer can capture the atmosphere of 19th century London so convincingly. A shame that the intrigues with regard to the uprising of the Shan states are so scarcely described that the end of the book was incomprehensible from a political point of view, even though I understood the human aspect of Edgar's downfall. 

Daniel Mason's novel The Piano Tuner (2002) is an intriguing work about the power of music, words, spirit, and the lure of the far away. The novel tells the story of Edgar Drake, a London piano tuner who, out of the blue, in 1886 is commissioned to tune an expensive Erhard grand piano in a remote outpost of Burma which had been requested by the outpost commander, Anthony Carroll, a physician and lover of music. Drake leads a quiet life and has been happily but childlessly married for many years to a woman named Katherine. The book is set against the backdrop of British imperialism and ongoing wars between Britian, France, Russia and the local Burmese.

The first half of the book moves slowly. It covers Drake's commission and his difficult voyage from London to his destination in Burma, Mae Lwin. The second part of the book describes Drake's efforts to tune the piano, his relationship with Dr. Carroll, and with a beautiful exotic Burmese woman, Khin Myo. There are twists and surprises at the end as the love of music and the depictions of the beauties of Burma become intertwined with harsh and ambiguous political and military affairs.

The novel is told with many insets from strange characters, such as "The Man with One Story" early in the novel, and through letters and dreams. Some of these insets are evocative in themselves but add little to the story and tend to slow down the work.

There is some excellent descriptive writing in the book. The parts I most enjoyed included the careful descriptions of the process of tuning a piano in the middle of the jungle. The piano tuner distinguishes between the initial tuning of the instrument, followed by the fine tuning to put the instrument in the best condition for serious playing. (I find this distinction valuable in my response to the book.) I also enjoyed the passages praising the love of music, learning, and culture, whether Western or Eastern, and a fine scene where Drake, who professes to have little skill at playing the piano, plays by memory most of the first book of Bach's "Well-Tempered Clavier".
There are some graphic scenes of the book, including an amputation, a description of death by snakebite, and Drake's bout with malaria.

As the novel moves on, the reader sees Drake becoming progressively more attached to Burma and its people and coming to a new understanding of himself in a distant land.

The story is lushly told and gave me a good feeling for Drake's quest (something of an "Odessey" in reverse) and growing efforts at self-realization. The book moves too slowly at times, the parts do not entirely fit together, and some of the basic premisies of the plot, I find, were not fully explained. With its love of music, piano, and human self-awareness, this book is an outstanding initial effort by its young author. As does a quality piano, however, it could have used fine tuning.

In 1886, British piano tuner Edgar Drake received a request from the British War Office to tune an Erard piano for a Dr. Anthony Carol who was using unorthodox methods to bring about a peace treaty between the Shan people and the Limbin Confederacy during the British colonial occupation of Burma. Edgar leaves his beautiful wife Katherine in London to make this trip to the primitive land of the Shan people.

What develops is a mystical story. It is one that is steeped in history but has characters so real that it is, at times, hard to distinguish between fact and fiction. That a magnificent piano should be in the heart of the Shan people is almost as incongruous as the presence of British soldiers in their land. The pace of the story is very slow. While that seems difficult to handle at first, one must realize that the distant land of Burma is a far different ambience from that of bustling city life in 19th century England. This is a story most unlike any other I have read and is quite a remarkable tale woven from much research by debut novelist Daniel Mason.