He is to tune the Erard grand piano that belongs to an English surgeon-major called Anthony Carroll, who for 12 years has been in charge of one of the secret British outposts in the Shan territories, in a village called Mae Lwin, on the banks of the Salween river. In 1886, a piano tuner called Edgar Drake, living a quiet life in London with his regular work and his subdued, affectionate wife, is summoned by the War Office to travel to Burma. On this dramatic material Mason has imposed an imaginary story that interweaves invented characters with historical figures, political analysis with vividly evoked atmosphere. The Limbin confederacy was savagely put down in 1887, and the bandit prince was captured and shot. In their attempts to pacify the Shan states and secure their eastern frontier, the British established outposts in the remote Shan territory. To complicate things further, local warlords, or dacoits, such as the legendary bandit prince Twet Nga Lu, launched ferocious campaigns of violence against the Shan. When the British took Mandalay, the Shan switched enemies and declared war on British rule. While the Shan fought the Burmese, the Burmese were fighting the British. In the 1880s these hardened into a movement called the "Limbin confederacy". The Shan states had for centuries staged periodic uprisings against Burmese rule. These were the small principalities of the Shan people, Thais who until the 16th century had ruled much of Burma. The threat to British rule of Franco-Burmese cooperation was compounded by local insurgency in the Shan states. After the Anglo-Burmese wars of the 1820s and 50s, in which the British took large amounts of territory, the Burmese signed a commercial treaty with France. Frequent, detailed history lessons are interspersed in the narrative to make this violent legacy clear. His CV, indeed, is a publicist's dream: he's a young American medical student with a biology degree from Harvard, who has been studying malaria on the Thai-Burmese border and in north-east Burma, and wrote his novel "between lessons at medical school".įor The Piano Tuner, he's become engrossed in the complex and bloody power-struggles of Burma in the 1880s, when the British were consolidating their empire. Daniel Mason knows the place and the history well. These surreal moments are grounded in the real history and politics of 19th-century British-dominated Burma. the thin lines of dust rising from her feet". A woman carrying a red parasol walks between fields of rice, "her dress shimmering in the mirage of the road. An elegantly designed, varnished mahogany grand piano from Paris floats, pounded by wind and rain, down a river in a jungle. A woman covered in a fluttering red veil stands in the desert, vanishes and turns into a song in the air. A few strongly coloured, curious images hang in the mind from this intriguing and alluring first novel.