(2 of 2)
Odd that she should compare herself to a gentleman; Miranda is very much a lady, despite her frantic attempts to live like a stripped-down version of Fanny Hill. Still, there are reasons for her attitude: for 30 years Miranda has been in love with Daddy, and the Electra currents never let up.
Bobbing on a yacht near Honolulu, the journalist heroine and her father, a domineering Englishman, begin to reminisce. Memories flood back: the death of Miranda's stepmother, her first lover, her childhood in a Manila prison camp, her second lover, her experiences as a gossip columnist and war correspondent, her third, 16th and possible 490th lover—the reader is never sure.
The sex of this first novel is, in fact, its least attractive aspect. All picaresques from Moll Flanders to Fear of Flying tend to grow repetitious; there are few things to give the woman who has everyone. But when Pamela Sanders, a former war correspondent, describes the Southeast Asian landscape she shows an acute sense of place, and her parodies of journalists are unfailingly funny.
This combination of commercial sexploitation and Oriental tong-in-cheek satire derives from Erica Jong and Evelyn Waugh. A peculiar and not unappealing combination, but Sanders would do better to write, as she does on occasion, in her own clear and witty voice.