But the situation of Bibi's ghost accompanying the group gives you a narrator who is effectively omniscient, but who is also a character in the story with her own opinions and viewpoint. The framing story about the author speaking to a woman who claims to be in communication with the dead narrator, and transcribing a story that she couldn't possibly have known, feels really anachronistic in a 21 st century novel.

The viewpoint is weird, and in some ways it adds originality and zest to the book and in some ways it doesn't quite work. (Minor point, but it really bugs me to keep seeing the trope of 'all the men did X, while all the women and Bennie did Y'.) It's not bad, by any means, but Tan doesn't quite pull off the trick of having sympathetic characters presented through the viewpoint of an unsympathetic narrator.

But it does feel a bit like there's a dynamic of 'the gay one' and 'the black one' and 'the British one' and 'the Chinese one' and 'the child' and 'the teenager' and a handful of default people. Now, it makes sense that a character like the narrator, Bibi Chen, a rich, Chinese-American art patron living in San Francisco, would have friends who were not all young, white, het males. With SFfD this is exaggerated by the set-up of a group of near strangers forced by circumstances into a dramatic situation it's very easy for them to be stock characters, especially since the group is rather obviously Diverse.

Tan does tend to draw a lot of minor characters who are memorable though painted with broad strokes. But this perhaps stands out from the crowd less than the various reworkings of The joy luck club. It's a good thing that Tan has decided to branch out, and she is still a strong writer tackling unfamiliar territory. Instead, it is about a group of tourists who get kidnapped in the Burmese jungle. Saving fish from drowning is not in fact yet another reworking of the Tan's single plot where a young Chinese-American woman sorts out her troubled relationship with her mother, intercut with harrowing stories from the mother's life in and escape from revolutionary China. How it came into my hands: The anglophone community's book pool. Reasons for reading it: I like Tan's writing, although she has the flaw of writing the same book over and over again. Verdict: Saving fish from drowning is a better than average middle-brow novel.

Details: (c)Amy Tan 20 Fourth Estate ISBN 0-00-721989-X

Saving fish from drowning review