Stephanie Jane reviewed The Piano Tuner by Daniel Mason
Too slow a pace
3 stars
The Piano Tuner by Daniel Mason is set in 1880s England and Burma (Myanmar). Our protagonist, a shy London piano tuner named Edgar Drake unexpectedly receives a War Office request to travel many hundreds of miles in order to tune a rare piano. He will be paid generously with a year's income for what is planned to be a three month commission. Despite his initial reservations, he decides to make the journey - his first outside of England.
I enjoyed Mason's writing when he describes the fabulous journey. Drake boards steamships and trains, travels through India as well as Burma, and Mason evokes the atmospheres, sights and sounds, colours and scents in wonderful detail. The mission itself does seem ludicrous, but having already read Giles Foden's factual account of the British Army's ship transportation through the Congo not so many years later, sending a piano tuner through Asia is simple …
The Piano Tuner by Daniel Mason is set in 1880s England and Burma (Myanmar). Our protagonist, a shy London piano tuner named Edgar Drake unexpectedly receives a War Office request to travel many hundreds of miles in order to tune a rare piano. He will be paid generously with a year's income for what is planned to be a three month commission. Despite his initial reservations, he decides to make the journey - his first outside of England.
I enjoyed Mason's writing when he describes the fabulous journey. Drake boards steamships and trains, travels through India as well as Burma, and Mason evokes the atmospheres, sights and sounds, colours and scents in wonderful detail. The mission itself does seem ludicrous, but having already read Giles Foden's factual account of the British Army's ship transportation through the Congo not so many years later, sending a piano tuner through Asia is simple by comparison!
The Piano Tuner does rely heavily upon exposition however and I was disappointed at how much this slowed the pace. Drake is taught Anglo-Burmese war history through lengthy War Office briefing documents which we also get to read. The information is dry and, while kind of relevant, isn't needed in such depth. The same could be said of the piano information dumps - a little is interesting, a long diversion is too distracting. Characters are often deliberately vague which made it difficult for me to maintain interest in their plight and I thought the ending was unnecessarily rushed. I came away from this book feeling it owed much of its overall story arc to Joseph Conrad's Heart Of Darkness - which I am now tempted to revisit - but without that classic's power.
