Road to Burma

Saving Fish From Drowning
By Amy Tan
Putnam, 474 pp., $26.95

Whether one loves her for her scalawag ghosts or her mother-daughter tyrannies, Amy Tan has amassed legions of faithful readers in the 16 years since the publication of her first novel, ''The Joy Luck Club." At the time she was one of a handful of writers who signaled a surge in Asian-American fiction, in large part because she rendered her female characters -- young and old, fierce and milquetoast -- with such intimate authority. Whatever half-baked ideas the dominant culture harbored about the velvet shackles of a close-knit Chinese-American family, Tan embroidered them in her fiction into a tapestry as revealing in its intricate despotism as it was heartrendingly universal.

Bibi Chen, the 63-year-old narrator of ''Saving Fish From Drowning," has all the earmarks of an idiosyncratic Tan archetype: She is bossy, garrulous, self-serving, and pitiable, and she vacillates between being amusing and annoying. She is also dead, having been murdered shortly before this story begins, and thus possesses the convenient trait of omniscience. In an author's preface, Tan reports that she discovered the real Bibi Chen in a spiritualist's memoir -- Chen was an art maven and socialite in San Francisco whom Tan knew briefly, then the woman popped up in a book Tan read as having visited a medium from beyond the grave. Tan latched on to this ghostly presence and gave her free rein in a far-reaching novel, resurrecting Bibi with such long-winded alacrity that the real Bibi would no doubt swoon with pleasure.

The rest of us, though, get a little tired. ''Saving Fish From Drowning" is the shaggy-dog story of 12 American tourists on an odyssey of self-discovery in Burma, where they had planned to travel under Bibi's aegis before she was found dead in her storefront window with a severed throat. Bucking up, the brave 12 decided to forge ahead without her -- this is what Bibi would have wanted, they feel sure; besides, it's too late to get a refund. So even though they have plenty of worries about Burma itself (now Myanmar, thanks to the oppressive military regime) they land in Lijiang, China, in the weeks before Christmas.

Because Bibi is overseeing this tale, we are introduced to her dirty dozen by way of her insights, biases, and gossip about each of them. The group includes a couple of gender-warring intellectuals (he's a psychologist; she's a Darwin scholar), a trust-fund freedom fighter too naïve to be of any use, her lackluster boyfriend, and a dog trainer named Harry who's a celebrity in the canine world. There's Heidi, a likable hypochondriac who overpacks but has antibiotics when you need them, and Marlena, an intrepid Chinese-American woman and her 12-year-old daughter, Esme. One divorced dad has brought along his teenage boy, Rupert, while the grande dame of the group, Vera, is a prominent 60-year-old African-American who runs a couple of foundations. Esme makes the entire cast more compelling when she falls for a little Shih Tzu puppy in the hotel lobby at the start of the trip, then smuggles Pup-pup halfway across Burma in a baseball cap.

The title of ''Saving Fish From Drowning" is taken from a fable about intentions and outcomes -- about a man who insists he is saving a school of gasping fish even as he drives them to the market to sell. The novel is peppered with vignettes of such legacies, be they emotional or political: Bibi's cruel stepmother, a woman called Sweet Ma, so hated life (and Bibi) that she put a curse on the girl that she might never feel the richness of love or beauty. There are other far-reaching themes: the high price of illusion, whether balm or opiate; what happens to charity when ego drives it; the equivocal gifts of a technological age; the delicate precipice of cultural relativism. Mostly these lessons are delivered through the pratfalls of our happy campers: When Harry mistakes a shrine for a urinal, the entire group has to get out of Dodge, but not before the local chief curses them all to a lifetime of trouble.

But now that Bibi is dead, she's immune to such plagues. The unflappable leader on this picaresque adventure, she follows her gang of 12 into the heart of darkness, and she makes us go everywhere, too: through bouts of dysentery, foiled sexual encounters (the mosquito netting catches fire), even Bibi's rambling discourse on how personal hygiene varies among nationalities. Eventually her prattle gives way to the real story of the novel, which is where Tan's gifts lie. Rupert, the handsome American teenager who has an offhanded talent for card tricks and minor magic, is mistaken by members of the Karen tribe as a returning deity. The Karens have taken to the hills to hide from the military regime, and their isolation has made them a sitting duck for imperialist ruses -- years ago a Mr. Kurtz wannabe fooled them into thinking he was their savior. Now they believe Rupert can lead them back to fields of plenty, and so they cheerfully kidnap the entire lot of tourists, driving them up into a secluded rain forest, then dismantling the final rope bridge that got them there.

This well-intentioned misbehavior happens halfway through the novel, and I reveal it here only because it is the first compelling thing that happens. Bibi has given us plenty of drum roll before now, with dropped hints about premonitions and last moments of freedom, but only when the band of three kidnappers arrive on the scene -- Black Spot, Salt, and Fishbones -- does the novel deliver on its earlier mounting tension. Taken to their remote and gorgeous prison, the tourists have to make do, feasting on insects and trying to figure out why the good-hearted Black Spot has brought them here. Harry, the dog trainer, has been left behind -- nursing a hangover, he slept in that day -- and so embarks on a global PR campaign to locate and free his friends. The ensuing journey, technological and actual, morphs into a clever satire about reality shows in an age where experience is measured by pixels and satellite range, where celebrity-drenched ''survivors" compete for the chance to live the way millions of people are forced to every day.

When it finds its point, ''Saving Fish From Drowning" is replete with the riches that have made Tan's reputation. She can be smart, funny, and above all a powerful storyteller -- Black Spot alone, for instance, is evoked with such deadpan charm that I longed for him to be the star of this show. But the novel is so suffused with repetition and dead-end anecdotes that the reader is as weary as our disoriented tourists by the time the action starts. It doesn't help, of course, that Tan has given the narration over to a mostly irritating ghost, and that the characters are consequently rendered as emotionally thin, near-cardboard creations. Toward the end of the story, Bibi's voice retreats into Tan's more even-handed one -- a technical accident but a welcome relief. When the emotional resolutions for the characters arrive, poignant as they are, one can barely summon the wherewithal to care. Tan is too good a writer to have buried her central story in a heap of peripheral prose. You want to send in a chopper for the ones worth saving, and I'm afraid Bibi wouldn't make the cut.

Gail Caldwell is chief book critic of the Globe. She can be reached at caldwell@globe.com. See ''Bookings," below, for information on a local appearance by Amy Tan.