The Piano Tuner

"The Piano Tuner, by Daniel Mason. It’s a first novel, and it’s extraordinarily original and interesting. It’s set in the southern Shan States in 1886 and it’s about Edgar Drake who specialises in tuning rare pianos. Drake gets a call from someone at the War Office saying would he come to see him about going out to Burma to tune an Erard, which is the rarest of all pianos: there were only maybe 90, and Napoleon was sent one and Beethoven had one. But in 1886, to get to Burma? You’re talking about at least six weeks’ travel. So Drake goes out and on the way he has strange conversations with people on the boat about myths, and they go through Aden and across to Bombay, and he’s dazzled by it. As you can imagine he’s never seen so many people, or so many beggars. They get the train to Calcutta and cross the Andaman sea to Rangoon, and then a train up to Mandalay where he’s met by this woman who says she’s going to guide him, and she speaks English and always wears a flower in her hair. Burmese women wear fresh flowers in their hair – apparently my grandmother had a fresh flower every single day. And she’s going to take him on the final journey by elephant up into the jungles, and she’s ravishing and reminds me of Aung San Suu Kyi. She is very quiet and obviously also the lover of Dr Anthony Carroll, who owns the piano. Yes, except much more civilised! So to cut a long story short, we’re now on to the Third Anglo-Burmese war, and there’s this chap called Surgeon-Major Dr Anthony Carroll, who’s posted to the Shan States in Upper Burma – in the jungles. And he has a strange empathy with the Burmese and has won over some local princes – warlords – by quoting them Shelley and playing the piano: it’s like winning hearts and minds. And he asked for an Erard, and the War Office sent one out – which is like someone in Helmand Province asking for a Stradivarius – and it now needs to be tuned. So Edgar Drake comes, and there are wonderful descriptions of him listening to the rain, because he knows about music. Orwell gives beautiful descriptions of Burma with butterflies as big as brooches, and the quality of the light and sunsets and so on, but Mason can talk about the different sounds of monsoon rain, and how rain falling on willows sounds different to rain falling on orchids or touching the ground, and it’s just wonderful. He’s really got the whole thing about the myths of Burma. Myths and magic and spiritualism and reincarnation are so important in Burma – just as in India – and every house has a ‘nat’: the spirits that look after your household, and they have different names. There’s ‘the lady with the green umbrella’, or ‘the prince in the yellow trousers’. There’s even a nat called ‘Major Thompson’, who was named after some important British person. And you leave flowers and little bits of food and do lots of washing and wishing and praying. Daniel Mason? I think he was a medical student there in the 1990s, and he did a lot of historical research. There was not a dull moment for me in this book: I loved it, and it has such a lot about the atmosphere of Burma. I think he gets this whole thing about the myths, and people setting so much store by little things. My grandmother had seven sons, and the monks who came down to her village in the morning with their begging bowls would be careful not to step on her shadow, because you knew that you mustn’t step on the shadow of a woman with seven sons. And he picks things like that up and doesn’t overdo it. Less is more. Unlike Karen Connolly."