Piano Tuner (Mason)

The Piano Tuner 
Daniel Mason, 2002
Knopf Doubleday
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781400030385


Summary
An extraordinary first novel that tells the story of a British piano tuner sent deep into Burma in the nineteenth century.

In October 1886, Edgar Drake receives a strange request from the British War Office: he must leave his wife and his quiet life in London to travel to the jungles of Burma, where a rare Erard grand piano is in need of repair. The piano belongs to an army surgeon-major whose unorthodox peacemaking methods—poetry, medicine, and now music—have brought a tentative quiet to the southern Shan States but have elicited questions from his superiors.

On his journey through Europe, the Red Sea, India, and into Burma, Edgar meets soldiers, mystics, bandits, and tale-spinners, as well as an enchanting woman as elusive as the surgeon-major. And at the doctor’s fort on a remote Burmese river, Edgar encounters a world more mysterious and dangerous than he ever could have imagined.

Sensuous, lyrical, rich with passion and adventure, this is a hypnotic tale of myth, romance, and self-discovery: an unforgettable novel. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio 
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Northern California, USA
• Education—Harvard University; University of California,
  Medical School
• Currently—lives in San Francisco, California

Daniel Mason was born and raised in Northern California. He studied Biology at Harvard, and Medicine at the University of California, in San Francisco. His first novel, The Piano Tuner, published in 2002, was a national bestseller and has since been published in 27 countries. A Far Country, his second novel, was published in 2007. Daniel has also published a short story in Harper's, on the life of the artist Arthur Bispo de Rosario. Currently, he lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. (From the publisher.)

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Book Reviews
Confidently weaving historical fact together with his own imaginative constructions, Mr. Mason creates a riveting narrative.... He has written a seductive and lyrical novel that probes the brutalities and compromises of colonization, even as it celebrates the elusive powers of music and the imagination.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times

Forty-one-year-old Edgar Drake seems an unlikely protagonist for a bildungsroman. Happy with his wife of eighteen years and his reputation as one of the finest piano tuners in late-nineteenth-century London, he is "a man whose life is defined by creating order so that others may make beauty." Transformation comes in the form of a summons to a remote outpost in Burma: a maverick British officer there has imported a vintage Erard grand into the jungle, where the humidity has caused it to lose its temperament. Drake's journey to the Far East is a kind of anti-Heart of Darkness, as he opens himself up to the uncertainty and wonder of human experience. In this début novel, Mason proves himself equally adept at scenes of wry humor and moments of rapture; most remarkable, he has written a profound adventure story with an unexpected climax, as the mild piano tuner finally becomes the hero of his own life.
The New Yorker

Richly imagined, The Piano Tuner winds like a lazy river, carrying the reader into the mythic land of Kipling and Conrad.
People

Set in Burma in 1886—a place of gilded temples, warring chieftains and duplicitous imperial powers struggling for dominance of Mandalay—this debut novel sparkles with exoticism. Unfortunately, the story can't conceal its inherent improbability nor the pedestrian nature of its title character, London piano tuner Edgar Drake, summoned from half a world away to tune the instrument of a brilliant, reclusive English officer, Anthony Carroll. In the first chapter, Carroll—botanist, diplomat, physician, linguist—is implausibly described as having won the heart of a warlord by reciting to him Shelley's "Ozymandias." Since Shelley's poem mocks the futility of power and military might, it seems like the least likely sonnet in the English language to win a warrior's heart. Certainly the choice belies Carroll's supposed reputation as a diplomat. As the piano tuner, a banal fellow capable of noting that "the camera is a wonderful invention indeed," inches his way toward the brilliant eccentric in the heart of the jungle, it is impossible not to think of this book as a sort of Heart of Darkness lite.
Book Magazine

Twenty-six-year-old Mason has penned a satisfying, if at times rather slow, debut historical. 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.
Publishers Weekly

In October 1886, piano tuner Edgar Drake receives an astonishing request from the War Office. He is asked to go to Burma to tune the Erard piano of Surgeon—Major Anthony Carroll, to whom the office is much indebted for keeping the peace in the remote and restless Shan States. Drake accepts the assignment and launches on a journey of self-discovery that takes him from London to Calcutta to Rangoon and, with the help of a mysterious Burmese woman named Khin Myo, to the compound of the formidable Dr. Carroll himself. Yes, he successfully tunes the piano and even plays a concert for visiting dignitaries he chooses Bach's immortal Well-Tempered Clavier, reasoning that it has universal application but Drake finds that he cannot leave. He is altered by the beauty of the place, slowly opening himself to Khin Myo, and caught up in Carroll's machinations, which may or may not be seditious. It ends, inevitably, in tragedy, but the reader will regret that it ends at all. This is an utterly involving first novel, rich in historical detail and as lulling as Burma itself. Mason's language is at once tropically lush and as precise as a Bach prelude. A novel for readers of literary and popular fiction alike; highly recommended. —Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal
Library Journal

A rattling good story, complex characterizations, and a brilliantly realized portrayal of an alien culture—all combine to dazzling effect in this first by a California medical student who has worked and studied in the Far East. Piano tuner Edgar Drake undertakes his journey (thrillingly described), arriving at the inland fortress where the suave Dr. Anthony Carroll—part Albert Schweitzer, part Mistah Kurtz of Heart of Darkness—rules as a benevolent despot, aided by a beautiful Burmese woman to whom Edgar finds himself increasingly attracted. A wealth of information-musical, medical, historical, political—and numerous colorfully detailed vignettes of life in Burma's teeming cities and jungle villages provide a solid context for the intricate plot, which brings Drake into 'complicity' with Carroll's visionary dream...until the powerful denouement [and the] deeply ironic climactic action. (One keeps thinking of what a marvelous movie The Piano Tuner might make.).... An irresistible amalgam of Kipling, Rider Haggard, and Conrad at their very best. Masterful.
Kirkus Reviews

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Discussion Questions 
1. In briefing Edgar Drake about Anthony Carroll, Colonel Killian tells him, “there are men who get lost in the rhetoric of our imperial destiny, that we conquer not to gain land and wealth but to spread culture and civilization” [p. 18]. Is this true of Carroll? Is he motivated to spread Western culture, via music, to the East? Is it true of Edgar? What does the novel suggest about the purpose of imperialism?

2. Why does Edgar decide to accept a mission to travel thousands of miles to tune a piano in a remote and dangerous jungle at the furthest outreaches of the British Empire? Why does his wife, Katherine, encourage him to go?

3. Why is Anthony Carroll viewed with such a mixture of reverence and suspicion by the British military? In what ways does his behavior defy convention?

4. As he contemplates his voyage to Burma, Edgar views London on a foggy night: “He could see the vague line of the shore, the vast, heavy architecture that crowded the river. Like animals at a waterhole, he thought, and he liked the comparison” [p. 23]. Why is this a particularly apt simile for Edgar to use at this moment? Where else in the novel does Mason reveal the depth of Edgar’s consciousness through his impressions?

5. Edgar writes to Katherine that the “entire trip has already coated itself in a veneer of seeming, a dreamlikeness” [p. 146]. In what ways is this true? What gives Edgar’s experiences an otherworldly quality? What role do his dreams play in the novel?

6. During the tiger hunt, Captain Witherspoon spots some egrets and asks if he can shoot them. “Not here,” Captain Dalton tells him. “The egrets are part of the founding myths of Pegu. Bad luck to shoot them, my friend.” To which Witherspoon replies, “Superstitious nonsense. . . . I thought we were educating them to abandon such beliefs” [p. 94]. What does this exchange suggest about the British attitude toward colonial subjects in Burma? About the cultural differences between the British and Burmese?

7. What is the significance of the boy to whom Edgar gives a coin being accidentally shot by Captain Witherspoon? Why does Edgar refer to the coin as “a symbol of responsibility, of misplaced munificence, a reminder of mistakes, and so a talisman” [p. 104]? In what sense does Edgar inherit the boy’s “fortune”?

8. How is Edgar perfectly suited to the task set for him by Anthony Carroll? How do his dreaminess, his propensity for getting lost, his clumsiness, and his political naïveté all serve Carroll’s ends?

9. After he’s been away from London for several months, Edgar writes to Katherine that he has changed, although, he admits “What this change means I don’t know, just as I don’t know if I am happier or sadder than I have ever been.” He also says, “There is a purpose in all of this...although I do not know yet what it is” [p. 252]. How has Edgar changed? What has changed him? What is his real purpose in Burma?

10. What kind of woman is Khin Myo? Is her attraction to Edgar real or feigned? What is her relationship to Anthony Carroll? How is she related to the woman with the parasol at the beginning and end of the story? Is she, as Nash-Burnham suggests in the ghostly conversation in the guardhouse, Edgar’s “creation,” a part of his “imaginings” [p.302]?

11. Music is a recurring theme in The Piano Tuner, from the hauntingly beautiful song the Man with One Story hears in the desert, to the love ditty Anthony Carroll plays on a flute to fend off attackers in the jungle, to the Bach fugue Edgar plays for the sawbwa, to the call of insects scraping their wings in the jungle. What roles does music play in the novel? How does it affect its listeners? What is its ultimate importance in the story?

12. After Edgar escapes from the guardhouse, he reads the note that Carroll had given him—a passage from his translation of The Odyssey about the Lotus-Eaters who “forget the way home” [p. 310]. In what ways has Edgar “tasted” of the lotus? Why does he find Burma so alluring? What does the lotus signify in this context?

13. Why does Edgar cut the piano loose from its moorings and send it down the Salween River in a rainstorm? In what way is this striking image—a grand piano floating downriver on an unmanned raft and being “played” by the rain—suggestive of the novel’s larger themes?

14. What accounts for The Piano Tuner’s elusive, hard-to-pin-down quality? What remains mysterious after the book is finished? How does Mason’s prose style contribute to the sense of ambiguity that pervades the novel?

15. At the end of the novel, Captain Nash-Burnham tells Edgar that Anthony Carroll is a traitor to England and suggests a number of possible roles for the Doctor: “Anthony Carroll is an agent working for Russia, He is a Shan nationalist, He is a French spy, Anthony Carroll wants to build his own kingdom in the jungles of Burma” [p. 301]. Edgar thinks Carroll is a genius and a peacemaker. Which of these interpretations is correct? Does the novel present enough evidence to decide?

16. Why does Mason begin and end the novel with the image of the sun and a parasol? What symbolic or cultural values might these images represent?

17. What does the novel as a whole suggest about the British Empire—its effects on colonized peoples and on those who try to rule them—in the late nineteenth century? How is this historical portrait relevant to our own time and the political and cultural conflicts between the West and the Middle East?

18. The Piano Tuner participates in a tradition of literary works that try to fathom colonized cultures vastly different from the author’s own. What features does Daniel Mason’s novel share with such predecessors as E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, or George Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant”? How is it different from these works?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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