Fiction: 'It is evil to take lives and noble to save them. Each day I pledge to save a hundred lives. I drop my net in the lake and scoop out a hundred fishes . . . Don't be scared,' I tell those fishes. 'I am saving you from drowning.'
Disingenuous deceptions, naive misunderstandings and the comic juxtaposition of the old and the new form the dynamic that drives this light-hearted novel. Its energy finds a fitting symbol in one of the many surreal images the book contains: a TV set plonked in the middle of a jungle, powered by a primitive tribesman cycling frantically on a stationary bicycle.
The novel tells the story of a group of 12 US tourists on an exclusive cultural tour along the Burma Road. The first half of the novel describes their bus journey. It is genuinely amusing, but the tone is predictable: the natives are funny, the tourists are silly. Can one write a novel about tourists in an exotic land, be it China or Provence or west Cork, in any other way? This part of the book is too long. By the time the bus comes to a halt, one feels as exhausted as if one had been along for the ride, marvelling at how eccentric foreigners are.
The break comes at a Burmese lakeside resort run by a disreputable drunken Swiss. Here Somerset Maugham takes over from Somerville and Ross and the action starts. But what can a novelist do with a busload of tourists in a beautiful country with oppressive military rule and dissenting rebels? They get kidnapped, and are lured across a bottomless chasm on a rope bridge that - how surprising - is swiftly pulled up behind them. Now we enter Evelyn Waugh territory, a jungle in which a ridiculous tribe, the Lajame, are in hiding from the military. Like most tribes one encounters in novels this one is extremely skilful in the ways of folk medicine and has access to an infinite supply of miraculously potent herbs. They are not as primitive as they look; they are a Christian cult, founded less than a century ago by a charlatan straight out of A Handful of Dust. The tribe is awaiting his return in a new guise and an unfortunate teenage boy in the group of tourists is mistaken for this messiah.
Tension enters the novel with the kidnap, making the second half of the book more thriller than traveller, which is good. But Amy Tan is different from Evelyn Waugh. She is much nicer, and so are all her many characters, including the primitive/modern tribesmen. So the tension soon slackens again, and the resolution is predictable.
The whole story is narrated by an art historian, Bibi, who died just before the tour she had arranged started. The device of the dead narrator is surely devalued nowadays, deployed as it was in Desperate Housewives. Although the omniscient narrator, as well as other omniscient beings, is well symbolised by the figure of a deceased tour guide who watches her clutch destroy her beautifully planned itinerary, the technique can be tiresome. Especially irritating is this dead narrator's ability to intervene in the "real world" on selective occasions. Isn't that against the rules? If you come back to direct the plot once, why not do it all the time?
It's a question that reverberates beyond the confines of the novel and that is possibly why Amy Tan plants it. At one level this books is an entertaining, satirical - if too long - romp. But under its light surface many questions of philosophical (and political) importance are dealt with. Reality and illusion, knowledge and ignorance, the comparable powers of ancient magic and of the modern media, are touched upon - as issues of global politics and the environment. Nothing is developed in any depth, however. Essentially it's at the level of cheerful sophisticated slapstick that the novel works best.
Saving Fish from Drowning, By Amy Tan, Fourth Estate, 472pp. £16.99
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne is a novelist and short story writer