The Piano Tuner

Finished The Piano Tuner. It ends with a sudden burst of action and high drama after meandering about in a lazy way up to that point. The Piano Tuner does tune a piano and does play for a group of locals; he does fall in love with the seemingly timeless nature of the country; he does fall in love in a kind of British way with the sole female character of the book; and he does end up being tested as to what he really wants and believes. As I read, I was reminded on occasion of the Haggard adventure books where white men played adventurers in darkest Africa. But the author makes an overt reference late in the book that is more appropriate as an adventure story reference: The Odyssey by Homer, where Odysseus takes ten years and a variety of adventures, including a visit to the land of the Lotus Eaters, to find his way home.

And then there is the Kipling poem of the other day which helped me to see my own yearnings to revisit a long ago time in a far away place, something which Edgar Drake, the piano tuner, actually does, not a revisit though, but rather a first time adventure as a forty-one year old and after eighteen years of marriage:

By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin' lazy at the sea,
There's a Burma girl a-settin', and I know she thinks o' me;
For the wind is in the palm-trees, and the temple-bells they say;
"Come you back, you British Soldier; come you back to Mandalay!"
Come you back to Mandalay,
Where the old Flotilla lay;
Can't you 'ear their paddles clunkin' from Rangoon to Mandalay?
On the road to Mandalay,
Where the flyin'-fishes play,
An' the dawn comes up like thunder outer China 'crost the Bay!

There's several more verses here...

It's late afternoon; gotta go walk in the rest of the light...