A few days after finishing this book I'm still wondering about it, and trying to gauge its impact. Janice Y.K. Lee's novel The Piano Teacher is set in Hong Kong, the action moving between 1952, when it begins, and 1941 and subsequent years, to which it flashes back frequently. Newly married Claire Pendleton comes to the colony with her engineer husband, but it is soon clear that marriage was for her an escape route from her life at home in England and she wants more than the stolid Martin. She takes a job as a piano teacher to the daughter of a wealthy and well-connected Chinese couple, the Chens, and she meets their chauffeur, Will Truesdale. Will is, however, more than a driver and his links to the Chens go back to pre-war days when all were part of a glittering, flighty and frivolous social set. As a relationship develops between Claire and Will, so we are told his story and that of the dreadful events of the early forties when Hong Kong was occupied by the Japanese.
The book scores very highly on atmosphere, on detail, on local knowledge and on its depiction of the dark days - it is unflinching here, but this frankness is right in the context. What I found less convincing was the character of Claire herself - she's a device by which the author tells her tale, but in herself she is undeveloped, almost inconsequential, even, and that's where the book lost me because I was involved emotionally on a general but not on a particular level.
What I mean by that is that I found the wartime scenes fascinating, illuminating, horrifying - important to know about - and as such, of course, one cares because what is being depicted really happened and real people suffered as the fictional ones are made to suffer. But I didn't care about Claire, or Will's glamorous Eurasian lover Trudy, I couldn't say that I came to know them, and this feeling of detachment (which applies to all the characters but Will, I think, and even then ....) let the book down for me. But that said, it's well-crafted and has much besides to recommend it, and I did read it with a lot of enjoyment.
