The Piano Tuner by Daniel Mason
One of my minor claims to fame is that I developed one of the first Burmese-language word processors in 1980s, a high-tech venture launched from a second floor “office” down the street from Sule Pagoda, up a dank stairwell guarded by a old woman selling cheroots from a sawed off coffee can. One of the predominant features of the office was a small loft with a bed where officials were apparently “entertained” as an integral part of the local agent’s deal-closing strategy.
The Burma of the 1980s, almost exactly a century after similarly quixotic events portrayed in Daniel Mason’s new novel The Piano Tuner, was still surreal.
Burma, like such other places on the periphery of the British Empire as Afghanistan, has been largely overlooked by authors. But late Victorian Burma (I cannot bring myself to call it Myanmar) seems to be undergoing something of a literary revival with Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace and Andrew Marshall’s travel memoirs The Trouser People dealing with the same period.
Somewhat surprisingly for a novel written in this era of politically correctness, The Piano Tuner portrays a Burma seen almost entirely through foreign eyes, as if it were a serialization in The Illustrated London News. The novel starts just after the fall of Mandalay and the deposing of Burma’s last king, King Thibaw, an event of some importance for the Burmese, but hardly mentioned by the British in this book who apparently see little difference between the last representative of a centuries-old dynasty and the Shan warlords, dacoits and other inconveniences standing in the way of complete pacification of South Asia. A far greater concern seems to be the French.
Surgeon-Major Anthony Carroll has been posted to Mae Lwin, on the banks of the Salween, on the Shan Plateau. Doctor Carroll demanded a piano, and not just any piano: he demanded an Erard grand. In spite of the request causing “serious consternation”, Carroll had been a “flawless servant of the Crown”, and the authorities depended on “his alliances with the local princes”, and so a piano was dispatched by steamer and elephant to Mae Lwin, where it promptly went out of tune owing to the damp. Hence the need for a piano tuner, and thus begin the adventures of Edgar Drake, the mild-mannered and susceptible specialist in Erard pianos.
The Shan—not unlike that Pathans on the other side of the Subcontinent—didn’t (and still don’t) take kindly to outsiders trying to impose their suzerainty, and had been a thorn in the side of the Burmese, were never subjected by the British, and even today are only tenuously part of a unified Burma. The 19th century sabwas that Carroll (and Drake) seduce with Bach and whose subjects the Doctor treats with a mixture of Western and local remedies have their late 20th counterpart in Khun Sa, the Shan warlord who ran a private fiefdom in the Shan States, financed (in the 1990s as they were in 1890s) by opium.
Given the failure of guns, a piano might not have been such a bad idea.
Drake, a quiet middle-class tradesman, finds it necessary to navigate the treacherous waters of colonial Burma, filled with the omnipresent dangers of politics, snobbery of his social betters, dacoits and malaria. One was more likely to capsized at a dinner party than on the Salween swollen with Himalayan snow melt.
But Burma enchants and seduces Drake, just as it has done Carroll. And through it all he cares for the beloved Erard, bandaging a bullet hole with splints made from bamboo.
Readers might be reminded of JG Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur, which deals with a similar expansionary period in British Imperial history, and similarly peopled with unlikely heroes characterized by a blend of eccentricity and precision peculiar, it would appear, to the British out East.
You can never go home again
More relevant for these modern times, perhaps, is to read The Piano Tuner as an allegory of the expat in Asia. Piano-tuner Edgar Drake is the middle manager sent out by Head Office to troubleshoot a technical problem. At once provincial and open-minded, he is seduced and overwhelmed by the new experiences and sensations, not least the sensuality of the place and people, finding that his personal growth ends up in conflict with his morals and marital responsibilities. He passes considerable time in an existentialist and ultimately fatal daze, not unlike the more modern expat protagonist in Charles Foran’s House on Fire.
Author Mason himself is a doctor, or at least on the road to being one, and spent a year studying malaria along the Thai-Burmese border (sans piano). One is grateful that the results of this period of study included a novel about this fascinating and neglected country, rather than just another paper in a medical journal. Surgeon-Major Anthony Carroll would have approved.
Editor’s note: Daniel Mason will be visiting Hong Kong in October.