Saving Fish From Drowning
by Amy Tan
Harper Perennial, $72
Just because you're dead, doesn't mean you no longer have a voice. Not unlike television series Desperate Housewives, which benefits from having an omniscient narrator, Saving Fish from Drowning is richer for its all-knowing character from the other side - Bibi Chen, a socialite and arts patron who 'guides' a group of Americans along the Burma Road. The 12 wide-eyed tourists depart on the expedition despite their leader having been slain just days before in circumstances explained at the end. Her fifth novel since the enormously successful Joy Luck Club, Saving Fish possesses Amy Tan's special knack for persuading readers to care about her characters. That's a tall order in a book with a cast of thousands, among them a British dog trainer, a dopehead and his 15-year-old son, and a Chinese-American art curator with her 12-year-old daughter. Aside from entertaining with romantic crushes, the usual cultural embarrassments that afflict clueless travellers and their kidnapping by a tribe, the book affords Tan an opportunity to criticise the Myanmese regime.