Another Review at MyShelf.Com

Publisher: Picador (Macmillan UK)
Release Date: January 2003
ISBN: 0330492675
Awards:
Format Reviewed: Hardback
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Genre: Historical Midlist [1886 London & Burma]
Reviewed: 2003
Reviewer: Rachel A Hyde
Reviewer Notes:

The Piano Tuner
By Daniel Mason 

     Edgar Drake is a piano tuner whose passion is music. He lives quietly and modestly with his wife and has never left England; now he is summoned to the War Office on an October afternoon, where he is given a remarkable task. He must travel to Burma in order to tune the piano belonging to Surgeon-Major Anthony Carroll, an extraordinary man who is trying to make peace between the British Empire and the Shan States. The piano is a rare 1840 Erard, and Edgar is the most suitable person for such an undertaking; the pay is reasonable and adventure beckons, so off he goes. On his epic journey, he will meet many strange people and see many remarkable things, fall in love and be changed forever.

     Teetering between literary and midlist is a magic world where (at least in my opinion) most of the best books exist, and this is one of them. Escape to a tactile world of colour where gentle Edgar Drake, English to the soles of his sensible shoes, is taken from misty London to the colorful, exotic and dangerous Shan States. It is impossible these days to embark on a journey quite like this–-one of the drawbacks of living in a Global Village-– but at least we can read about it, and debut writer Daniel Mason writes with an enviable fluency of a vanished world. Here is a conflict between the world of the arts and the world of the military, the twin meeting electrically in the character of Carroll as well as the meeting of the British Empire and the misunderstood East. Mason has spun a tale that sucks the reader in from page one with a small cast of well-drawn characters and a wonderful setting for his tale. Conrad would have loved this one; highly recommended in all senses of the term.

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