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Title: The Piano Tuner : A Novel by DANIEL MASON ISBN: 1-4000-3038-2 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 19 August, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.73 (88 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Great first novel
Comment: A Great first Novel!
I was lucky to pick up an advanced copy of this first novel at the library. It caught my attention with its subject matter as I had just read'Tournament of Shadows' by Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Brysac about the history of the 'great game' in Central Asia (a great non-fiction book). I found the Piano Tuner's adventure story and it telling against the roll of the British Army in the jungles of Burma an interesting backdrop to this novel set in the late 1800s. The Piano Tuner is going to be a big hit! It is so well written, filled with great visuals and as the Piano Tuner, Edgar Drake, travels from London to Burma just to tune a mysterious piano for a mysterious officer. It's basic structure reads like 'Heart of Darkness'. I really enjoyed this first novel. (I am sure Mr. Daniel Mason will not be able to complete medical school as we will all want to read his next book.) Now I wonder who will make this into a movie.. I see Ralph Fines in the lead.
Rating: 4
Summary: Dreamy and Hallucinatory, but Not Without Some Problems
Comment: The centerpiece of Daniel Mason's lovely and graceful debut novel, THE PIANO TUNER, is a grand piano that belongs to Surgeon Major Anthony Carroll, a strange (and perhaps dangerous) officer stationed in a remote village in Burma. The piano isn't an ordinary grand piano...it's an 1840 Erard with a black mahogany veneer and a delicate mother-of-pearl inlay of flowers.
THE PIANO TUNER opens in October 1886 and centers around shy, retiring Edgar Drake, a forty-one year old London piano tuner who is well-known as being one of the best in the business. In fact, he specializes in pianos made by the firm of Sebastian Erard. When Drake is summoned by the War Office and told to go to Burma to tune Carroll's piano, no one could be more surprised than Drake, himself.
Readers might wonder why Carroll even has a grand piano in such a remote area of the world, but in THE PIANO TUNER, Mason makes the reasons seem quite believable. Surgeon Major Carroll has simply refused to work without one and only Surgeon Major Carroll, the British believe, can form the necessary alliances with Burma's royalty and thus stave off Siamese and French advancement into Indochina.
Drake really doesn't want to go to Burma. He's not a traveling man, he doesn't like the military and he's happy at home with his wife, Katherine. Yet, go he does, not so much out of loyalty to Britain, as love for music and the piano.
The journey to Burma takes up about one-third of the book (THE PIANO TUNER is quite slow paced, but I liked that aspect of it and I think it "fit"), but Mason's writing in these passages is some of the book's most poetic and lyrical. He seems to be especially good at setting and description. As Drake travels through France, Egypt, India and into Burma, he writes letters to Katherine that are filled with lush descriptions of the new sights he's seeing, the doubts and fears about the journey he's undertaking, his awe at the lush, brilliant beauty of the East. We realize, little by little, that Drake has been thoroughly seduced...by Burma (then Myanmar).
When Drake finally does meet Anthony Carroll, he seems quite a bit like Kurtz in Conrad's HEART OF DARKNESS. He obviously loves Burma, but he's an enigma. He can be ruthless, yet he has a sensitive side as well and loves both poetry and music. He also seems to be very happy to have Edgar Drake as a companion. Drake, however, is far more enchanted with Carroll's assistant, Khin Myo. I couldn't empathize completely with Drake's infatuation with Khin Myo. I kept remembering Katherine and her love for her husband.
Mason is obviously a writer whose natural talents lie in the realm of setting and description rather than in character or dialogue. While Edgar Drake was characterized quite beautifully, both Carroll and Khin Myo are a little clichéd and a little "off key." The characters thoughts were rather clumsily written as was the dialogue, but at least the thoughts were there (many of today's authors skip them entirely, a huge mistake). The subplots were beautiful but they didn't connect as seamlessly to the main plot line as they should have. They had a disjointed quality where there should have been fluidity.
THE PIANO TUNER is comprised of letters, official documents, reports and various stories told by various people at different times. All this makes for a rather choppy narrative, but only at times. However, I still thought a straightforward narrative would have served far better. This is definitely a story that needed the fluidity throughout that Mason lavishes on it when describing its setting. At times the writing is dreamy and hallucinatory and, at times, this is just what is needed, but at other times, I think it got in the way of the story.
Despite a few problems, I thought THE PIANO TUNER was a lyrical and poetic novel and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. More impressive, however, is the fact that the author is but twenty-six years old and still a student. The book would seem to have been written by someone much older. I will definitely read Mason's next novel provided the subject matter is something that interests me and I do think he's quite talented.
I would recommend THE PIANO TUNER to anyone who wants to read a book set in a lush, exotic setting and who can tolerate a slow paced book.
Rating: 3
Summary: enjoyable
Comment: I found this book to be a good read and an impressive first novel - all the more so considering the author wrote it while in medical school. He did a great job of establishing and maintaining the feel of 19th century british burma. The characterizations were good too, with many of the characters classically romantic. My only two complaints are 1) the ending was rather abrupt, and seemed rushed, as if he ran out of steam and 2) occasionally he employed a sort of stream-of-consciousness/run-on-sentence style that was jarring, difficult to follow, and did not match the high level of craftmanship of the rest of the book.
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