Literary Fiction Review

I’ve been sitting on this review for a few days now because I felt that once I wrote, it, I would be forced to leave the book behind and move on to another project. I didn’t want to do that. While others have seen fit to compare Ms. Lee’s debut novel The Piano Teacher to The English Patient, I found much more Fitzgerald in Ms. Lee’s tale than I did Ondaatje. This is a seduction of sorts, an homage to Hong Kong and its effect on the myriad expatriates who land there. The trappings surrounding such a composition make for a good, well-told story, but the city remains the star.

The characters in The Piano Teacher are not particularly likeable—ala most of Fitzgerald’s characters—yet the reader is drawn to them in the manner one is captivated by the riches one might never attain. For this is one facet of the city we are shown, and those who live upon that surface are the European elite who use Hong Kong as both a playground of ethereal delights and a willing player in the contest for wealth. Beneath it all is the suspicion that Hong Kong is deceiving them all, that trust is a fleeting shadow, that the winners might be losers.

Ms. Lee tells the story of two time periods, the first during the 1951, when Claire arrives in Hong Kong with her husband, Martin, a water engineer. She is quickly hired as a piano teacher by a wealthy Chinese couple, Victor and Melody Chin, who also employ an English driver, Will Truesdale. This is a time when Hong Kong is struggling to dust herself off from the ravishes of war, and to become again the jewel that she was. Yet it is also a time when blame must be apportioned, and those who chose the wrong side, or both sides, must be punished.

We meet Will again when the story flips back to early 1941 when he is the new arrival who is immediately captivated by the capricious Eurasian, Trudy Liang. Trudy unleashes her chamaeleon-like charms on Will, partying in a devil-may-care manner of charm while at the same time displaying herself openly as insulting and scheming. When the Japanese invade Hong Kong in December of 1941, Trudy is shown to be, above all, a survivor.

As the story rocks back and forth between the two decades, Claire struggles to understand her blossoming relationship with Will, while Hong Kong itself seems to mold her into the person she was meant to be.

While the final portion of the book deals with the theft of the Crown Jewels—something I found to be measurably necessary, yet off-putting—on the whole The Piano Teacher is a wonderful novel of love, hate and intrigue set in one of the most gloriously confusing places on earth. Kudos to Ms. Lee, and may this be the first of many more books to come.