The Pianoplayers

by Anthony Burgess

Book Overview

This novel is one of Anthony Burgess's most accessible and entertaining works. By turns bawdy, raucous, tender and bittersweet, and full of music and songs, this is a warm and affectionate portrait of... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 009952550X
• ISBN13: 9780099525509
• Release Date: January 1987
• Publisher: Arrow
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 0.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 4.4" x 0.6" x 7.0"

Customer Reviews

even a weaker effort from Burgess is a fun read

'The Pianoplayers' is a decidedly offbeat novel, which comes as no surprise since it was written by the sometimes brilliant yet always offbeat Anthony Burgess. It is a hodgepodge of a story about a woman recounting her life with her piano playing father and how music and sex are somehow interwoven. While the main premise is a load a rubbish the author never fails to entertain with some very clever and often humorous dialog. The book is also rather poorly structured; I got the sense the author sort of mashed together multiple stories and then sewn them into one book. With better editing this book could have been a classic. Bottom line: sometimes it is good to read something enjoyable yet silly.

Virtuoso

For Burgess, one of late 20th century's certifiable master fiction writers, a piece like The Pianoplayers is a bit of a diversion. It is light, it is funny, it comes with the most basic kind of message (people need love, sex, and affection if they are to remain happy and sane). A lesser writer would be thrilled to have produced this charming comic work, a summation of Burgess's life, times, and preoccupations. Ellen Henshaw is the daughter of a pianoplayer (not a "pianist," she would insist, which is something entirely different), an accompaniest to movies in the old days of the silent screen. The first portion of the book details her father's attempts to stay financially afloat through various plots and schemes, leading to his demise at the keyboard. The second half shows Ellen blooming into a world famous expert on the power of love (prostitute is too prosaic a term for what she is). Burgess relates the story in female first person, and the voice is pretty much free of any obvious false notes. Much has been made of Burgess's comparisions to Joyce, and here he does employ a slight variation of the stream of consciousness technique, but it never impedes the flow of the story. This is a dandy concoction.

Sounds Pretty Flimsy, No More Than a Whimsy

Anthony Burgess wrote this light novel about the same time he was doing the first volume of his autobiographical "Confessions" entitled Little Wilson and Big God. If you don't know the autobiography, maybe you can take The Pianoplayers as straight fiction. But I had read Little Wilson and Big God, not once but twice, by the time I picked up this novel in a outdoor bin in Sydney. And I was hopelessly aware that much of what I was reading was pure autobiography, loosely repackaged with scarcely a fictive figleaf to disguise it. In this case the figleaf is a change of sex. The narrator is Ellen Henshaw, an elderly woman born in the same place and year as Burgess. Henshaw's father, a dreamy, easygoing musician who plays piano accompaniment in fleapit movie theaters, is merely Burgess's dad pulled down a rung or two on the social scale. The first two-thirds of the book follows Ellen and her father on their picaresque social and sexual adventures, through bedsitters, cinemas, pubs and music halls in Manchester and Blackpool. Finally old Mr Henshaw collapses and dies after three weeks of a marathon performance at the piano keyboard. This brings the quasi-autobiographical section to an end. Ellen now goes back to school--first to a convent, then to a school for whores on the Continent. She tells us sketchily that she amasses a pile of money, returns to England, then gets back on The Game as an enterprising madam with a international string of brothels. Somehow a son appears in the story and has farcical adventures of his own, mostly involving an obese mother-in-law who dies on holiday in Italy and gets strapped like a piece of luggage to the roof of a Fiat. Burgess is very inventive with his heroine's career path--for example, she is lured from convent to courtesanarium by a high-class Belgian strumpet disguised as a nun--but he doesn't have the stamina to develop the characters' turns of fortune into something more than a series of whimsical digressions. I was irritated by the cavalier attitude of an author who seems to be asking me to care about characters who are presented as little more than cartoons.

Read This

This book is wonderfully written by a master of the English language. He writes in the first person as a girl, a difficult task for any man, but if you didn't know who wrote it, you wouldn't be able to tell. The book is entertaining and very interesting. It is very different from "A Clockwork Orange," which is good because here you can see the author's depth and amazing ability.