Search - The Piano Tuner

Set in the late 1880s, an English piano tuner is practically ordered by the British War Office to go to Burma in order to tune a fancy piano for an army doctor that is doing the Good Imperial Work in the hinterlands near the Siamese border. The first couple hundred pages are slowly rolled out with his leave-taking of this wife of 18 years and his travel all the way to Burma. In Burma, the piano tuner – and the reader – mainly kills time, waiting for something terrible to happen. The descriptions of the geography have great interest. I like novels in which expatriates - especially ones who would be better off staying home - end up in trouble deep, even if the characters are thin and the incidents are few.