I'm not a celebrity, but get me out of here anyway

The narrator in Amy Tan's Saving Fish from Drowning is stuck in the gap between aspiration and achievement, says Anita Sethi
Saving Fish From Drowning by Amy Tan
Buy Saving Fish From Drowning at the Guardian bookshop Public domain

Saving Fish from Drowning
by Amy Tan
Fourth Estate £16.99, pp476

Amy Tan's ambitious fifth novel is narrated by a ghost who, like all of Tan's heroines, is caught between two worlds, part of both yet belonging to neither; although her body is dead, her heart is still ensnared in the land of the living. This ghost's story is glued to that most agonised of tenses, the past unreal conditional: she tells us what she 'would have done, could have done, if only' she had not messed it all up. This sense of thwarted possibility washes a submerged undercurrent of frustration throughout, stuck as she is, too, in the gap between aspiration and achievement.

The ghost was once upon a time a Chinese-American woman, named Bibi, an art expert who loses control over that trickiest of arts: living - and dying - well. The novel opens with a path not taken: she had organised an art expedition down the Burma Road for herself and a group of West Coast tourists, but died in a 'freak accident'.

'It was not my fault,' insists Bibi who tells us instead of 'the faults [she] inherited' from her dead mother: crooked teeth, restless dissatisfaction. Brought up - or dragged down - by a violent, abusive stepmother, she develops a thick emotional skin. How can she not become hard-hearted if 'a mother is the one who fills your heart in the first place'?

So far, so Amy Tan. But she soon wanders off her habitual mother/daughter territory and into discursions on imperialism and human rights. The tourists eschew Bibi's itinerary for a 'tortuous, winding route' into the jungle where they are kidnapped by tribesmen and end up in No Name Place. Their rescue risks sacrificing the tribe to the military: do they save their skins or choose altruism?

Saving fish from drowning, so the Buddhist fishermen in the eponymous proverb would have themselves believe. How else but by sophistic rationalisation could they bear the burden of their cruelty? The fishermen are a metaphor for those who would plunder humanity and seek self-justification.

The intense pain caused by Tan's trademark tug of war between mothers and daughters is slackened by packing in so many characters and themes. The reader's concentration is diffused: we don't know quite where to look. But that is the point: the meanderings, irony, playfulness are diversions, distancing techniques; ways of dancing around pain without having to look it directly in the eye.

'I learned to hide from pain. I hid my deepest feelings so well I forgot where I had placed them,' Bibi tells us. No Name Place becomes metaphorical for those dark, forbidden emotional places we fear going, for some things do not bear thinking - or speaking - about. The lost tourists 'focus on trivial matters. All else was unbearable to consider.'

This is a world in which words don't get to the heart of the matter but instead take their speakers on a journey to a place where heart no longer matters so much. It can't. How do we cope with the terrifying possibility that all love might be conditional; that, should we chance to fall in, nobody is going to help fish us out?

In the world Tan evokes, words become weapons of mass self-deception, and we have art not to reflect the stark truth of what we are but, as Nietzsche would put it, 'so as not to die of the truth'. In her great frothy 500-page verbiage, Bibi's deepest feelings remain bottled up, bobbing along in the narrative until the final pages. But words are double-edged swords - initially a refuge from truth, they paradoxically end up carrying all its weight. In Tan's compelling portrait of a drowning humanity, pain seeks us out in our hiding places, however far we would run.