Carroll, who beguiles the local tribes with music and poetry, may be mentally unsound. Yet there are also intimations that, like Kurtz in ''Heart of Darkness,'' the eccentric Dr. If a piano is the concession we must make to keep him at his post, then it is a small cost.'' ''He is indispensable,'' a colonel explains, ''and he commands one of the most dangerous and important posts in our colonies. Only this brilliant doctor, they believe, can form alliances with the region's princes and fend off encroachments by the Siamese and the French in Indochina. The piano's owner - Surgeon-Major Anthony Carroll - refuses to work without it, and the authorities are extremely anxious to keep him happy.

Then a sudden summons arrives from the War Office, requesting ''service in the name of Her Majesty.''Īn 1840 Erard grand, shipped at great cost from England to Mandalay and then carried by elephant and porter to a remote military outpost in the Shan States of northeastern Burma, has (not surprisingly) arrived badly out of tune. When the book opens, in October 1886, he is 41 years old, a ''tall, thin man with thick graying hair that hung loosely above a pair of wire-rim glasses'' - a man, we are told, who looks ''more like a schoolteacher than someone capable of bearing any military responsibility.'' His life is quiet and satisfying, if perhaps a bit constricted. The result, if more traditional and less original than ''Kalimantaan,'' is thoroughly engaging, an excellent early-21st-century reproduction of a late-Victorian novel.Įdgar Drake, a specialist in pianos made by the firm of Sebastien Erard, is counted among the finest of London's piano tuners. But Mason's hero is a piano tuner, not an empire builder, and his perspective dominates the novel despite its many official documents. Godshalk's brilliant historical novel about the East Indies, ''Kalimantaan,'' this is the tale of a British man who leaves home to encounter aspects of empire in the colonies. LETTERS, military documents, official reports, stories told on a ship or a train or the back of a horse or in a bamboo fort deep in the jungle - all these contribute to the rich texture of Daniel Mason's fine first novel, ''The Piano Tuner.'' As with C.

The Piano Tuner by Daniel Mason