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.
By Daniel Mason
353 Pages
Picador
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.
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.
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