This is how books are made. You piece together what you know, what you find out, and what you imagine. The reader thinks it's all of a piece, a fine-spun work of pure imagination. Writers, however, know different.
But The Piano Tuner has more than structural craft to commend it. It combines public affairs -- imperialism, wars, history -- with a sensitive probing of inner feelings, most notably Edgar Drake's for his wife, and the ambivalence of his attraction to a young Burmese woman, Khin Myo.
Yet there's no hint of the cynical combination of eroticism and violence that the writer of a commercial blockbuster will routinely arrange to lure his readers (and publisher). This is the work of a true artist. It's an astonishing book, and in several different ways at the same time. It contains fascinating detail on the history of the British wars against the Shan people in the 1880s and their heroic resistance, on pianos and their tuning, Burmese pwe (performance art), malaria, tiger hunts, and the plants and animals of eastern Burma.
The plot has a single narrative thrust rather than being a complex interweaving of the fates of many characters. It's given depth by means of a peculiar method of rendering dialogue where the alternating remarks of two people follow each other without punctuation in the same paragraph. The effect is to make an argument, or a sequence of questions and answers, feel like an oppressive dream, something Drake is imagining in his head. The resulting impression is that he is out of his depth and is somehow being trapped by the encounter.
The book world, like the music world, is increasingly dominated by big business. These publishers aren't interested in issuing a large number of new books. Instead, they want a few books by known names that they can promote energetically. This is bad news for young writers, as it is for young musicians, but sometimes they can strike lucky. Even these big publishers need new blood -- after all, if they don't sign the young artist up, someone else may.
But even though Daniel Mason is still a student, Pan Macmillan can't have had many doubts about The Piano Tuner. It's a fine achievement. Macmillan actually have a good track record in that the excellent Across the Nightingale Floor was from them as well. They promoted it with enormous application last autumn. Now The Piano Tuner is their big book for the spring. This may well be the best novel you'll come across this year. From any point of view it constitutes a remarkable debut.
RSS