Daniel Mason · 2002 · exile

Daniel Mason's 2002 first novel, written at twenty-six while he was a medical student. In October 1886 the War Office asks a London piano tuner to travel to the Shan States and tune an Erard grand belonging to an army surgeon who is keeping the peace out there with music, medicine and poetry - and may be committing treason.

1. 1
   London

   October 1886, and a middle-aged tuner of Erard pianos in a Franklin Mews workshop is summoned by the War Office - asked to travel to the Shan States to tune a grand piano, which he assumes is a joke and it is not.

2. 2
   Marseilles

   Across the Channel and down through France by train, and aboard a steamer at Marseilles - a man who has never left England beginning a journey that takes most of the first half of the novel and is the best part of it.

3. 3
   Alexandria

   Egypt, and the Suez Canal seventeen years open - the passage east that made this journey a matter of weeks rather than months, and the point at which Drake stops recognising anything at all.

4. 4
   Bombay

   India, and the machinery of empire: a piano tuner travelling on War Office papers, treated with a deference he has not earned and cannot account for, and reading Carroll's reports on the way.

5. 5
   Calcutta

   Across the subcontinent by rail to the Bengal capital, where the men who actually run Burma explain their view of Surgeon-Major Carroll - which is that he is either indispensable or a traitor, and possibly both.

6. 6
   Rangoon

   The Irrawaddy delta, and Burma at last - annexed the year before, the King deported to India, and a country the British are still discovering they do not govern as completely as the maps suggest.

7. 7
   Mandalay

   Up the Irrawaddy by steamer to the old royal capital, the palace emptied and the Burmese court dispersed - and here the guide Khin Myo joins him for the last and hardest stage of the journey east.

8. 8
   Toungoo

   Into the Shan hills by mule and river with a Burmese woman and a boy called Nok Lek, through country where the writ of the British Empire is a matter of opinion and the piano is still four days off.

9. 9
   Mae Lwin

   A night crossing of the Salween by boat, and Drake steps ashore and tells the men waiting: I am Edgar Drake. I am here to repair a piano - and finds Carroll's compound, and the Erard, and does not leave.