Was the British Empire a matter of exporting the best of England to the world, as people back home tended at the time to believe, or was it, as most people now take for granted, really a matter of exploitation and profit?
This fine new novel dramatically opposes the two motivations. It's a historical novel set mostly in Burma in the 1880s. This was the time the British were consolidating their colonial hold over the country. In particular, they were trying to subdue the independent-minded Shan peoples, something the military rulers of modern Burma are still attempting to do.
Edgar Drake, a London piano tuner, is asked by the British government to travel to Rangoon and beyond to tune a piano. The explanation of this bizarre commission is that its owner, Surgeon-Major Anthony Carroll, though by traditional standards an undoubted eccentric, is the most successful outpost commander in the entire territory.
He lives in Mae Lwin, a fort far from the major British settlements. Here, in the middle of the Shan hill country, Carroll alone encounters no opposition. London, as a result, feels it must do as he asks and send a tuner, just as it had earlier sent him a grand piano.
When Drake arrives in Burma he discovers that Carroll, as well as being a doctor and a musician, is a naturalist and a scholar. He collects botanical specimens for London's Kew Gardens, is proficient in the Shan language, and is transcribing Shan music for the Western piano. For their part, the warlike Shan adore him and will do anything he asks.
The British back in Mandalay, however, are not so sure. Either boorish soldiers or narrow-minded socialites, they have nothing in common with this scholar-aesthete. And openly hostile opinions are circulating. With his adoring disciples and fluent Shan, could Carroll possibly be less than loyal to the British crown? Could he be more than a little sympathetic to the aims of its enemies? From the point of view of a civilizing colonial mission he is, of course, a jewel in the imperial crown. But from the point of view of conquest and subjugation, he is at best a potential, and perhaps an actual, embarrassment.
This fine novel is partly a tale of travel and adventure, but in this dimension it touches on a profound contradiction. The civilizing and conquering concepts are set one against the other, and the book's implication is that they cannot co-exist.
Daniel Mason spent a year in Burma between graduating in biology at Harvard and going on to study medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. He worked on malaria on the Thai-Burma border, and this is where much of the novel's action takes place. He wrote most of it while he was there, apparently.
People who can write as well as this don't let things like an oppressive tropical climate stand in their way. And this book is indeed marvelously written. In addition, it's a fabulous tale, wonderfully constructed and imagined, and very intelligently told. It's almost impossible to believe it's been written by someone so young.
The conclusion must be that it represents the arrival of a striking new writer and story-teller. As you'd expect, Mason combines the history he's researched with the Burmese hill-country he's experienced at first hand. To these he adds imagined elements, and also finds place for his enthusiasms, the piano presumably being one of them.
RSS