Fiction: Daniel Mason's stylish début brings poise, understatement and subtle evidence of intense research to the historical fiction genre, writes Eileen Battersby.
An English officer serving in Burma has already irritated his superiors through his demand for a grand piano. Now he requests that a piano tuner be despatched from London to repair the instrument, an 1840 Erard grand, now badly out of tune due to the jungle's humidity. That the officer, a doctor and also a man of culture with a feel for poetry, is known to be eccentric is apparently countered by his skills as a peace keeper. Into this pocket of 19th-century British military indulgence enters Edgar Drake, the piano tuner, clearly a gentleman and a very unlikely hero.
Daniel Mason's stylish début brings poise, understatement and subtle evidence of intense research to the historical fiction genre. This is a gentle, careful book; the narrative is slow moving and deliberate, as is Drake, a man old beyond his years. He takes pride in his skill, that of tending pianos, but makes no claims to being a musician.
Approached by the War Office, Drake finds himself in late 1886 on the way to Burma in order to serve his country by means of fixing a valuable piano far from his usual working milieu of polite drawing rooms and concert halls.
Drake proves an inoffensive, rather ordinary character who barely exists outside his vocation. There is also his enduring love for his wife. The early romance of their marriage has survived in part because of their shared sadness. They have had no children, so are closely dependent on each other. In a way, Mason uses this fact to render them as still young and yet curiously old.
Now 41, Drake responds to the first adventure of his life and becomes as secretive as a boy, withholding the information from his wife. In contrast to their domestic world, is the official bluster of the military and its formal rhetoric. Some sense of London emerges, albeit of the foggy, standard 19th-century city. But Mason never forces his prose, or his narrative.
Even in the area of his most obvious weakness, dialogue, which tends to be flat and toneless, he never attempts pastiche. Nor does the novel slide into cloying romance, Mason is a disciplined writer: there may not be much inspiration, but nor is there excess.
Once Edgar Drake sets off on his journey, the novel begins to acquire some life and colour from the exotic geography through which Drake travels. On board ship, dialogue again proves laboured, as does the stock set piece featuring an old man known for telling the one story time and time again. Drake is of course told the tale.
For Drake's personal impressions of his adventures, there are the detailed letters he writes home to his wife. This reveals as much about himself as it does about the trip. As early as his introduction to the Mediterranean he is enthusing,
How I wish you could see the beauty of these waters! They are a blue like none that I have ever seen before. The closest colour I can think of is the early night-time sky, or perhaps sapphires. The camera is a wonderful invention indeed, but how I wish we could take photographs in true colour so you could see for yourself what I mean. You must go to the National Gallery, and look for Turner's Fighting Temeraire, it is the closet to this that I can imagine. It is very warm and I have already forgotten the cold English winters. I spent much of the first day on deck, and ended up with quite a sunburn. I must remember to wear my hat.
The obvious contrasts between life as lived by the natives and the Little England created by the settled colonists and the soldiers are described. One of the strongest episodes features a tiger hunt that goes disastrously wrong. Drake remains true to himself for much of the journey. Finally, after various delays, including a siege, he meets the enigmatic surgeon-major Anthony Carroll, the eccentric officer who owns the piano.
Even here, Mason, an American and currently a medical student, resists making Carroll impossibly larger than life. More than half-way through the narrative, we finally see the piano at the centre of the story. It "was covered by a blanket of the same material Edgar had seen on many of the women, decorated with thin multi-coloured lines". The heart of the book is this beautiful piano and the many images of it. It arrives in a place utterly alien from its natural environment. Carried on an elephant's back, it is later supported by six men, one of whom is bitten by a snake. The dead bearer's body is strapped to the instrument.
Later still, at the close of the novel, abandoned and doomed, floating down a river on a raft, the piano's destruction acquires a dramatic lyricism. "The raft shook, the piano sang, the keys were slung forward with the energy of the release. The raft paused briefly in the current, turning, then caught in willow branches, their leaves stroking the piano's surface. And then a curtain of rain and the piano was gone."
There are predictable elements. Drake's passion for a beautiful native woman is elegantly handled, if clichéd and less convincing than it might have been. Yet one of Mason's strengths is his restraint, he does not opt for caricatures. The story is slow-moving; Carroll is not even particularly interesting. But there is a twist. Even here, however, Mason uses his material well, refrains from taking risks and keeps his book balanced between intelligently nuanced romance and subdued adventure.
The Piano Tuner neither fails nor succeeds on either the personality of Carroll or the fate of his piano. It is quiet, dreamy Edgar Drake, a man who begins to live before it is too late, only to discover it is too late, and his temptation that take over as the real story of the novel.
Mason's achievement lies in the evocation of a lush physical world of sunlight and shadows, myths and fears and the ongoing clash between cultures. His characters are far less important than their gestures and their desires. For all its grace, however, it is one of those polished, if slightly lifeless novels that leaves one feeling not quite engaged and somewhat detached.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
The Piano Tuner. By Daniel Mason. Picador, 356pp. £14.99