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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Sounds Pretty Flimsy, No More Than a Whimsy, March 30, 1999
By A Customer
Anthony Burgess wrote this light novel about the same time he was doing the first volume of his autobiographical "Confessions" entitled Little Wilson and Big God. If you don't know the autobiography, maybe you can take The Pianoplayers as straight fiction. But I had read Little Wilson and Big God, not once but twice, by the time I picked up this novel in a outdoor bin in Sydney. And I was hopelessly aware that much of what I was reading was pure autobiography, loosely repackaged with scarcely a fictive figleaf to disguise it. In this case the figleaf is a change of sex. The narrator is Ellen Henshaw, an elderly woman born in the same place and year as Burgess. Henshaw's father, a dreamy, easygoing musician who plays piano accompaniment in fleapit movie theaters, is merely Burgess's dad pulled down a rung or two on the social scale. The first two-thirds of the book follows Ellen and her father on their picaresque social and sexual adventures, through bedsitters, cinemas, pubs and music halls in Manchester and Blackpool. Finally old Mr Henshaw collapses and dies after three weeks of a marathon performance at the piano keyboard. This brings the quasi-autobiographical section to an end. Ellen now goes back to school--first to a convent, then to a school for whores on the Continent. She tells us sketchily that she amasses a pile of money, returns to England, then gets back on The Game as an enterprising madam with a international string of brothels. Somehow a son appears in the story and has farcical adventures of his own, mostly involving an obese mother-in-law who dies on holiday in Italy and gets strapped like a piece of luggage to the roof of a Fiat. Burgess is very inventive with his heroine's career path--for example, she is lured from convent to courtesanarium by a high-class Belgian strumpet disguised as a nun--but he doesn't have the stamina to develop the characters' turns of fortune into something more than a series of whimsical digressions. I was irritated by the cavalier attitude of an author who seems to be asking me to care about characters who are presented as little more than cartoons.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Virtuoso, June 30, 2005
For Burgess, one of late 20th century's certifiable master fiction writers, a piece like The Pianoplayers is a bit of a diversion. It is light, it is funny, it comes with the most basic kind of message (people need love, sex, and affection if they are to remain happy and sane). A lesser writer would be thrilled to have produced this charming comic work, a summation of Burgess's life, times, and preoccupations.
Ellen Henshaw is the daughter of a pianoplayer (not a "pianist," she would insist, which is something entirely different), an accompaniest to movies in the old days of the silent screen. The first portion of the book details her father's attempts to stay financially afloat through various plots and schemes, leading to his demise at the keyboard. The second half shows Ellen blooming into a world famous expert on the power of love (prostitute is too prosaic a term for what she is).
Burgess relates the story in female first person, and the voice is pretty much free of any obvious false notes. Much has been made of Burgess's comparisions to Joyce, and here he does employ a slight variation of the stream of consciousness technique, but it never impedes the flow of the story.
This is a dandy concoction.
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2.0 out of 5 stars
His frankness is his best aspect, April 26, 2010
Well this is a tale about the life of Ellen Henshaw, she grows up in modest conditions with her father making his living as a pianoplayer for the silent movies in the 1920's. Already when Ellen is a minor she earns her first money as a prostitute. Later she will make a living by being a prostitute and eventually she turns a madam. Her life is in no way sad, actually it seems quite ordinary and commonplace. Somewhat it seems like the point of the story is, that following the line of her father (the pianoplayer), eventually Ellens grandson becomes a pianist. From there the title: "The Pianoplayers" - The talent of her father as a pianoplayer finally reemerges in her grandson. The story seems somewhat like a film, I don't know if Anthony Burgess was thinking of movies when he wrote it? The best thing about the book is that the fact that Ellen starts as a prostitute as a minor is in no way a sad or terrible thing, contrary it's just quite normal and ordinary. It's nice that the author don't make a fuss about something which there is maybe no reason to make a fuss about.
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