Product Description

On a misty London afternoon in 1886, piano tuner Edgar Drake receives a strange request from the War Office: he must leave his wife, and his quiet life in London, to travel to the jungles of Burma to tune a rare Erhard grand piano. The piano belongs to Surgeon-Major Anthony Carroll, an enigmatic British officer, whose success at making peace in the war-torn Shan States is legendary, but whose unorthodox methods have begun to attract suspicion.

So begins the journey of the soft-spoken Edgar across Europe, the Red Sea, India, Burma, and at last into the remote highlands of the Shan States. En route he is entranced by the Doctor's letters and by the shifting cast of tale-spinners, soldiers and thieves who cross his path.

As his captivation grows, however, so do his questions: about the Doctor's true motives, about an enchanting and elusive woman who travels with him into the jungle, about why he came. And, ultimately, whether he will ever be able to return home unchanged to the woman who awaits him there . . .

Sensuous and lyrical, rich with passion and adventure, THE PIANO TUNER is an unforgettable and haunting novel.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #66785 in Books
• Published on: 2004-01-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

About the Author

Daniel Mason received his bachelor’s degree in biology at Harvard in 1998 and spent a year studying malaria on the Thailand-Myanmar border, where much of The Piano Tuner was written. He then went on to become a medical student at the University of California, San Francisco. A seasoned lecturer, brilliant and inexhaustable, he couldn't be more promotable.

Customer Reviews

One of the best novels I've read in years
Mason's The Piano Tuner may well become a classic: it is an ambitious endeavour to come to terms with haunting issues. While unravelling the journey of Edgar Drake to late nineteen-century Burma to tune an Erard piano, Mason probes deeply into the foundations of British imperialism and, consequently, into the misperception of the other, the exotic and the unknown. As Edgar himself is forced to admit "...I have come to think that 'bringing music and culture here' is more subtle - there are art and music here already - their own art, their own music". Yet, the protagonist's quest is as much related to knowing the role of music, and art in general, in international politics as a personal journey whose return is ever deferred by a series of events: his growing curiosity and empathy towards Anthony Carroll, who had ordered the piano to be taken to the Burmese jungle in the belief that "music, like force, can bring peace" ; his infatuation for Khin Myo, Carol's mistress; and the realisation that he has "seen more than he could have imagined and he has understood more of what he has seen, but at the same time this incompleteness grows more acute" .
Indeed, this feeling of incompleteness pervades the narrative. The stories he hears about Carroll offer nothing more than an incomplete portrait of the doctor. Further, the letters he sends home only concur to this feeling, as Edgar admits that he has "written so much, and yet still he has described so little of what he has done or seen".
Like the protagonist, the reader embarks on a journey through exotic places, scents, textures, languages and, ultimately, ways of perceiving reality only to discover that the truth eludes us and that it is in the myriad of narratives that any approximation to 'what things really are' is to be found. Therefore, an interpretation of The Piano Tuner has inevitably to come to terms with classics, like Homer's Odyssey and, especially, Conrad's The Heart of Darkness, undoubtedly the text that is more often brought into the diegetic and conceptual world of this novel.
One of the best novels I've read in years.

ingenious, well-researched but disappointing
This book has a lot going for it. The plotline is intriguing - an expert piano tuner, an authority on Erards, goes to darkest Burma to tune the piano of the eccentric but hugely effective Surgeon Major Carroll. The writer knows a lot about different aspects of his subject - sea travel in the late 19th. century, the topics which interest Carroll, Burmese history, the British presence in Burma, pianos and how to tune them .... all of that seems fine. It's fairly well written and moves forward in a competent way. But I seldom was really interested. Why? I think this is a book which works too hard. There is just too much validating detail, the stuff you need to make an exotic book like this come to life. It is too consciously written and it loses the naturalness and simplicity of a well-told tale. Once the tuner, Drake, got to Carroll's base I quite liked it, and I read the second half quickly, drawn on by the story, but I was never fully convinced and I did not find it compelling.

Difficult but rewarding
At first I found it hard to get into this book. I started reading it expecting an adventure story, and though there is some action involved (precious little however), that is perhaps the wrong way about it. Perhaps the best way to read it is let yourself be immersed in the rich, lyrical language, almost as if you would read a poem.

The plot reminds of `Heart of Darkness' by Joseph Conrad: in this book too an individual sets out to find a military commander, living in a remote area of an Asian state occupied by a Western country. Apart from that however, the difference could not be bigger, `The piano tuner' is almost a mirror image of `Heart of Darkness'. Whereas the latter focuses on the dark side of the human mind, the former concentrates (in beautiful language, I cannot help but repeat), on the beauty of the Shan states and its inhabitants. Edgar Drake (the piano tuner of the title) opens his heart to this beauty, with unexpected consequences.

One to savour!