The lure of the jungle

This is a curious story. In 1886, a year after the final British conquest of Upper Burma, a piano-tuner, Edgar Drake, is requested by the War Office to travel to the Shan States – still largely untouched by British power – to tune a rare 1840s Erard piano. The piano was originally shipped to one Surgeon-Major Antony Carroll, an ambiguous, slightly Kurtz-like figure, who rules a remote area in the Shan States, and who is either making peace or fomenting war or even (as we finally hear alleged) spying for the Russians among the Shan. It remains unclear throughout the novel just why Carroll required a piano – and especially such a rare one – for his enterprises, nefarious or patriotic, nor why he had not realised from the first that it was bound to go out of tune instantly in the Shan jungles. But on the one occasion when the Erard is properly played – by Drake – it has an improbably powerful effect on the Shan sawbwas whom Carroll has assembled in his fiefdom to discuss a peace treaty with the encroaching British power.