Review: The Piano Teacher by Janice YK Lee

I'll be honest, I wasn't looking forward to reading this book. It really didn't look like it would be my kind of thing.

Last year I was buying birthday presents for a neighbour and wanted a couple of novels to go with her champagne and chocolates. My friend is a gentle, lovely, homely sort of person and I wanted some gentle, lovely, homely sort of books - so I chose The Return by Victoria Hislop and The Piano Teacher by Janice YK Lee.

I had read and enjoyed Hislop's first novel, The Island, so I knew it was the right sort of thing. The other, I'm afraid, was a real case of judging a book by its cover. I knew nothing about either the story or the author but it looked like it would be of a similar ilk.

When my friend offered to lend me The Piano Teacher a few weeks later, I politely accepted, but I'm afraid I wasn't enthusiastic. As a fan of Edgar Allen Poe and the like, chick lit makes me do a major swerve on sight. Anything with high heels on the cover or a blurb going on about women looking for husbands and I can't bung it back on the shelf fast enough.

With its pastel colours and whimsical picture of a woman in Oriental dress meandering across a beach, the cover wasn't floating my boat. And when I reacquainted myself with the synopsis - 'two beautiful women, one mysterious man', etc - my heart sank and it got chucked straight to the bottom of my To Read pile.

After several months had passed, I thought I'd really better get the thing read and returned before my friend forgot I'd ever borrowed it. And, against expectations, it was a jolly good read.

Set in Hong Kong, over two time periods - one at the outbreak of the Second World War and the other in the early 50s - The Piano Teacher took me on a highly unexpected journey. Yes, its focal point is love (or lack of it) but this is an engrossing and at times upsetting exploration of the impact of war.

When naive English newlywed Claire is brought to Hong Kong by her nice but dull husband, she finds herself both captivated and alienated by the exotic, complicated social etiquette. But a handsome older man soon begins to show her that she can be more than the English rose everyone expects. Yet Will, the dashing chauffeur, cannot let go of a past betrayal, something which will come between Claire and her exciting but distant lover.

The two stories are interspersed throughout the tale, with the darkness of the past creeping into the light of the present. From the very beginning, Lee shows a strong talent for characterisation, bringing the culture-shocked Claire into sharp focus almost immediately and making her the most sympathetic character in the story. Far from a bland tool to help shed light on the haunted Will, Claire's character is carefully sketched and her relationship with Will is far from idealised.

At the start I thought that Will was going to be a paint-by-numbers contrary cad, intriguing yet cold, but as his past experiences are drawn out into the light, his own inner conflicts give him greater depth and interest. Interestingly, it is with the book's most exotic character, Will's wartime lover Trudy, where Lee fails to fill in the blanks.

Whether this is deliberate or not is open to debate, particularly as Will himself is uncertain how to read Trudy's actions and attitudes. For much of the time it appears that she is a cardboard cutout, a character being sold as loveable purely on the basis of looks and charisma. At other points we are given a glimpse of something more illuminating, a contradiction which is reflected in Will's enduring confusion over his lost love.

But the story really gets into a different territory when war finally breaks into the champagne lifestyle of moneyed Hong Kong, taking dark and at times horrific turns as the mirage of Western privilege is rapidly dissolved by the realities of conflict.

There are some unanswered questions at the end, but life isn't always black and white, so that's no bad thing.