It's an attractive looking book, a perfectly pleasant picture on the front, nice quality paper, and it's just the right size for my coat pocket.
I have a few more compliments for it, but not many.
The opening line was appalling. the rest of the prologue/chapter 1 not much better. With an opening as weak as that, it was going to need something special to recover.
The story concerns a Piano Tuner who is commissioned by the army to travel to a remote corner of Burma to tune the piano that was sent out to Anthony Carroll, a somewhat eccentric Dr General in the army, to help him civilise the natives.
Edgar, the eponymous tuner of erard pianos, is a rather dull character. His wife is slightly less charismatic. She only exists in the story so that Edgar can feel guilty later on when he is predictably attracted to a native girl in Burma.
There are segments of the book that work very well. At times the prose is truly a thing of beauty, evoking place and time with what feels like scalpel precision.
Unfortunately, much of the prose is merely workmanlike, and some of it is pretty bad. There are frequest tense shifts, the strory shifting from past to present tense for a couple of pages and then back again for no particular reason. He also uses quote marks for 60% of the the dialogue in the book, but for the other 40% he Cormac MacCarthy's it - abandoning quotes and other punctuation - but without MacCarthy's skill at still making the dialogue easy to follow.
The precision of the descriptive passages is spoilt by things like stating that the scenery is passing to quickly for him to see - whilst riding in a horse drawn carriage. How fast exactly is that hose traveling? When I'm in a car doing 70, I can still watch the scenery go past. Similarly, at one point he is galloping along on a pony, his fancy woman is sitting on the back of the horse in front, behind the driver(?) of the horse as it gallops along at high speed - except she is apparently riding sidesaddle and holding a parasol in one hand - WHILE ON THE BACK OF A GALLOPING HORSE.
In the section where she is demonstrating this trick riding ability, we hear twice within three sentences how Edgar is excited by the "thrill of the speed" using the exact same words three sentences apart in the same paragraph. That's bad writing. Despite the book being set in the latter half of the 19th century, there are some remarkably 21st century attitudes on display.
The storyline meanders slower than the river he travels down for half the book. There are pages and pages of info-dump about the different tribes of Burma, about the history of the Erard Piano, detailed descriptions of how to tune a piano, etc. The second half of the story is slightly faster paced. After the build up of how amazing the Doctor is, Anthony Carroll was actually a fairly engaging character and certainly the saving grace of the story.
However, Mason chooses to obfuscate and avoid telling us a lot of what Carroll is doing, trying to foster in the reader a sense of mystery and eventually ambiguity about the revelations at the end of the book. However, it reads more like he didn't know which side to come down on so he left bits out.
I wanted to like this book a lot more than I did. However, the lack of a strong storyline, the clumsy attempts at artful writing that come off as pretentious tosh, and the dullness of the central character are not redeemed by the occasional flashes of good writing.
A lowly 5.5/10. If you like your historical fiction to be pretentious, go for it. You can buy this from most online booksellers.
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