Carroll welcomes Edgar's repeated postponement of his return to England. Is Edgar's new companion a Russian agent, a French spy or simply a man drunk with power? Is he a compassionate healer? A naturalist, musician and poet whose political views are far in advance of British imperial policies? Whatever his contradictions, Dr. Edgar's delight and confusion deepen as he rides through glorious landscapes, encounters exotic birds and plants, meets princes and peasants and assists in the life-saving amputation of a boy's mauled fingers - all in the company of the doctor, who can't resist showing off a place and people he has come to love but who also hides much and may be manipulating the truth for his own reasons. Carroll's fief of Mae Lwin, where the second half of the novel takes place. His search for a truer reason carries us into Burma (now Myanmar) and eventually to Dr. I remember what you told me in London, that it is such noble work, that it is my duty to my country, but this cannot be: I never enlisted in the army when I was young, and have little interest in our foreign affairs.'' In truth, I was a little frightened when I left, and sometimes when I lie in bed, I question why I am going. To his wife he writes: ''Please do not worry about me. On this, the first substantial journey of his life, Edgar proves the most sensitive of instruments, resonating like a sounding board to every encounter although still unsure just why he's traveling. Carroll's ''General History of the Shan Peoples'' and from ''The History of the Erard Piano'' - form little islands of narrative in the sea of Edgar's startled perceptions. The stories - exotic biographies of Edgar's fellow travelers the terrible tale of ''The Man With One Story'' excerpts from Dr. Edgar's wife asks him to ''return to me with stories,'' and these are exactly what we get as we follow him on a journey that takes up a third of the novel. If a piano is the concession we must make to keep him at his post, then it is a small cost.''įrom these romantic premises the plot unfolds at leisure, complete with Victorian digressions and secondary tales.
''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.