The Piano Tuner, by Daniel Mason

Into the heart of imperial darkness in Burma

The other day I threw a wobbly. Delivering a manuscript to my publishers, I dedicated it to "the playing members of the St Petersburg Philharmonic". There were howls of protest. What about the non-playing members? Yes, I said, the non-playing members are terribly important, but this is my book and I'm dedicating it to the playing members. So it went on, until I capitulated. Right, I said, I won't dedicate it to anyone if that's what you want. I suppose it was inevitable a novel about a piano tuner should arrive for review.

But there's a twist in the tail. What might be regarded as an instance of ironic retribution turned out to be divine intervention. Daniel Mason's book, far from being a species of chastisement, is an absolute pleasure, in so far as the two things can be separated. For in a subtle way, the romantic adjacency of chastisement and pleasure lie at the heart of this extraordinary, finely crafted work of fiction.

First and foremost, The Piano Tuner is about Upper Burma toward the close of the 19th century. More specifically, it is about Britain's greedy intent to subjugate the Shan States. But Mason's take on this fruitful scenario is angular. His central character, Edgar Drake, is a London tuner commissioned by the War Office to travel to Mae Lwin, an imaginary outpost on the easterly Salween river bordering Siam, to restore an Erard grand piano. The Erard belongs to Surgeon-Major Anthony Carroll – a maverick administrator who combines interest in music, botany and medicine with a quietly brutal determination to stamp his authority on Burma's wayward tribals.

The scene is set for Drake's entrapment. An introspective lover of Bach out of key with Britain's imperial mission, he falls for a succession of seductive encounters: with Carroll himself; with Carroll's Burman beauty, the parasol-bearing Khin Myo; with Shan custom; with his own vocation as a master technician; above all, with the misty majesty of the Burmese landscape.

It would be churlish to reveal the dénouement, which touches on the great game played out in Asia between Britain and Russia. Suffice, or almost suffice, to say that Mason's novel commands immediate inclusion in the handful of English-language books about Burma that merit anyone's reading. It is written with consummate attention to detail, the intricacies of piano maintenance in tropical climes included, and with sustained good taste.

More broadly, there is an obvious resonance between the figure of Dr Carroll and Joseph Conrad's Kurtz, as immortalised by Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now. It is also curious that such a decidedly colonial novel should have been written by an American medical student, whose first novel this is, and conceived while investigating malaria on the Thai-Burmese border. In part, The Piano Tuner is a lovingly reconstructed Victorian travelogue. Descriptions of old Pagan and Mandalay, of a tiger hunt, even of the Suez Canal and a strange Arabian storyteller, delay the reader's outward passage. But such excursions only enhance what is a remarkable portrait of ambiguous, conflicting ambitions.