The Piano Tuner
A Novel
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4.1 • 79 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A New York Times Notable Book
A San Francisco Chronicle, San Jose Mercury News, and Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year
“A gripping and resonant novel. . . . It immerses the reader in a distant world with startling immediacy and ardor. . . . Riveting.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
In 1886 a shy, middle-aged piano tuner named Edgar Drake receives an unusual commission from the British War Office: to travel to the remote jungles of northeast Burma and there repair a rare piano belonging to an eccentric army surgeon who has proven mysteriously indispensable to the imperial design. From this irresistible beginning, The Piano Tuner launches readers into a world of seductive, vibrantly rendered characters, and enmeshes them in an unbreakable spell of storytelling.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Mild-mannered piano tuner Edgar Drake seems like an odd hero to lead us through a story about 19th-century Burma. Sent to Southeast Asia by the British War Office, Edgar’s been tasked with tuning a rare piano while the Shan revolt and other conflicts rage. As Edgar gradually awakens to the social complexities of the political situation, author Daniel Mason channels a deep knowledge of the region’s geography and history to create an intriguing and compelling read. Mason’s lyrical writing made this the kind of novel we didn’t want to end.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Twenty-six-year-old Mason has penned a satisfying, if at times rather slow, debut historical novel. Edgar Drake lives a quiet life in late 19th-century London as a tuner of rare pianos. When he's summoned to Burma to repair the instrument of an eccentric major, Anthony Carroll, Edgar bids his wife good-bye and begins the months-long journey east. The first half of the book details his trip, and while Mason's descriptions of the steamships and trains of Europe and India are entertaining, the narrative tends to drag; Edgar is the only real character readers have met, and any conflicts he might encounter are unclear. Things pick up when Edgar meets the unconventional Carroll, who has built a paradise of sorts in the Burmese jungle. Edgar ably tunes the piano, but this turns out to be the least of his duties, as Carroll seeks his services on a mission to make peace between the British and the local Shan people. During his stay at Carroll's camp, Edgar falls for a local beauty, learns to appreciate the magnificence of Burma's landscape and customs and realizes the absurdity of the war between the British and the Burmese. While Mason's writing smoothly evokes Burma's beauty, and the idea that music can foster peace is compelling, his work features so many familiar literary pieces the nerdy Englishman; the steamy locale; the unjust war; the surprisingly cultured locals that readers may find themselves wishing they were turning the pages of Orwell's Burmese Days or E.M. Forster's A Passage to India instead.
Customer Reviews
Where to begin?
And how to end? For anyone interested in history, be it geopolitical, musical, cultural or medicinal, and married with travel and distance from one’s formerly “known world” and existence into other worlds and lives expanded, this is a must read. For myself, the story was engrossing at the outset. Descriptive images set each scene as if I could feel the dampness of London, the heat of the Gulf of Aden, the fellowship of soldiers on the river boats, the driving rains, shimmer of mirages, colors of spices, sounds of singing rocks and cool respite of the breezes along the riverside, Edgar’s conflict. There is so much, a potential overdose of intrigue, emotion, connection, suspense and purpose, given in appropriate and sustaining doses. I’ve read it 3 times. Each time is better. There will be more.
The Piano Tuner
The best book I have read this year.
Hallucinatorily vivid visit to another world
Read this years ago now but it's still high up on my long-term favorites list. Rarely have I been more thoroughly transported into a culture so alien, yet rendered with such exquisite richness of sensory detail as to immerse me in a magical sense of its immediate presence. Like the main character - a sort of innocent (even an archetypal Fool) engaged in the bizarre (but believable for Britain's Empire days) task of transporting a piano hundreds of miles through progressively impossible 19th century Burmese terrain to bolster a strategic military connection - I slipped almost unawares into an increasingly addictive surreal, lovely and treacherous world, filled with golden temples and narrow, greenery swathed, near-vertical footpaths shrouded in mist, from which I soon could not imagine turning back. (Hmm; some comparison could perhaps be made to the deep in-country journey at the heart of "Apocalypse Now," with the increasingly surreal flavor of the landscape and culture, and the fateful, suspenseful sense of leaving all familiar parameters behind and heading toward some existential and possibly transfiguring/annihilating destiny). There's also a love story, and a rich Burmese historic-fiction plot (tribal tensions, coup, catastrophe), of which I can't recall the details so many years hence, but for me these elements were all contributory ingredients in the book's principal magic of completely transporting me to a place I'd barely known existed: an immensely satisfying experience of exotic armchair time-travel. It could be thought a challenging read by some in its sense of strange displacement (I'm scared to recommend it to my book club!), but I *loved* it. It's even on my "read again" list, and that's a very limited roster. If you are fascinated by remote Eastern cultures, exotic foreign landscape, and unusual metaphorical/metaphysical journeys, please read this book.
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