The Piano Tuner

This being the title of a book by Daniel Mason, a chap who started out as a Harvard biologist but who then went in for doctoring. In between, in 2002, he spent time on malaria on the Thai-Myanmar border, during which he wrote this best seller. No idea what he is doing now, but he did publish a second novel some years later. I came across the first amongst the many books which come with our holiday house.

A book which can be said to have three threads. First, a piano tuner from London. Second, a charismatic and piano loving army doctor in the Shan Hills who goes native, rather in the way of the trader in 'Heart of Darkness' or the colonel in 'Apocalypse Now', with the piano tuner taking the role of the seeker who goes up country. Third, the setting in the Shan States of 1875 or so, at that time in a unsettled state following the incomplete incorporation of Burma into the British Empire.

We are taught quite a lot about the mysteries of piano tuning and about Érard grand pianos, with Érard being an important milestone in the evolution of the modern grand piano. It seems also that a piano tuner in the 19th century did more than just tune a piano, he also serviced it, rather in the way that one might now service a car or a washing machine, in particular by giving the hammers and action a wash and brush up. Not something a blind person could take on - thinking here of the once common association. Perhaps no longer, with the numbers of pianos to be tuned not being what it was.

We are taught quite a lot about the Shan States of the middle of the second half of the 19th century, from whose situation I associated to the clans of the Scottish highlands of the century before. There are political parallels. Mason also makes the point that the British were very concerned at the time about the French pushing into Indo-China from the east - a change from their better documented concerns about the Russians pushing towards the Indian sub-continent from the north. A facet of the great game which I had not known about.

Apart from the story seeming a bit far fetched, I did notice a few mistakes and I did worry that the book contained a lot of material which would have taken a lot of gathering and checking, a lot for someone who had a day job with malaria. How careful had he been? How reliable were his facts? And there is the usual difficulty with historical fiction of this sort in knowing which bits are fact and which bits are fiction. I dare say the general sense of the condition of the Shan States at the time is not that far off, but it would be interesting to take another look at the story from another hand - to which end the references at the end of the book are not very helpful, being to books which I imagine I would have some difficulty getting at. On the other hand, Amazon offers various possibilities.