Bel Canto (2002)
Who wrote it?
Ann Patchett (1963- ; active 1992- ), born Los Angeles, USA to a police captain and a nurse. Her mother and father divorced while she was young, and at the age of six she moved to Tennessee with her mother. She studied at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, and later won a fellowship to the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachussetts, where she wrote her first novel, The Patron Saint of Liars (1992).
She worked for Seventeen magazine for nine years, as well as publishing non fiction for a range of newspapers and magazines. Her third novel, The Magician’s Assistant (1997) was nominated for the Women’s Prize (losing out to Carol Shields’ Larry’s Party), but Bel Canto, her next release, was her breakthrough, winning both the Women’s Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award in the US. She has now published eight novels, with State of Wonder (2011) again receiving a Women’s Prize shortlisting, and her most recent The Dutch House (2019) getting a Pulitzer nod.
She has additionally published essays and short stories, and a memoir of her close friendship with writer Lucy Grealy, Truth and Beauty: A Friendship (2007).
What's it about?
Bel Canto takes place in the initially plush surroundings of a party held at the residence of the Vice President of an unnamed South American country, in honour of the head of a Japanese corporation, Mr. Hosokawa. The powerful businessman is there to be wooed into a potential investment in the country, and has been tempted to attend a birthday party in his honour by the presence of world-famous opera singer Roxanne Coss, with whom he is (artistically) obsessed.
The party comes to an abrupt end with the arrival of a band of terrorists who hold the attendees hostage at gunpoint. Soon realising their mission to capture the President has failed (he is absent, having stayed home to watch his favourite soap opera), an uneasy stalemate sets in, with over fifty powerful male guests (plus Roxanne) kept hostage for months by the increasingly directionless guerrillas. What begins as a crisis situations soon morphs into a strange alternate reality for both captives and captors, with relationships (romantic, platonic, even quasi-familial) developing in the most unlikely of circumstances.
What I liked
Though somewhat spoilered by the blurb, I did love how it took a conventional thriller narrative and turned it into something else entirely. Following the initial chaos of a terrorist hostage taking, the remainder of the novel is really about human relationships and particularly what happens when very different people are forced to coexist in unusual circumstances.
I know naff all about opera, but I feel like there’s certainly a very dramatic and musical pacing to the whole thing. An intense overture, then a very long period of tension building towards an inevitable conclusion that provides a form of catharsis when it finally arrives (however sad and dramatic).
The setup is also very interesting to look at in a post-lockdown world. Many people will have been thrown together, if not with terrorists or oligarchs, with people who we wouldn’t normally spend 24 hours a day with. Equally, there are threads in here about the characters coming to adapt to their circumstances and believe that they could (at least in some ways) be preferable to a return to “normal” reality. Lots to relate to here, I felt.
I loved the character of Gen, the interpreter. He begins the novel seeming like a minor character, essentially a downtrodden servant of Mr Hosokawa. But his story becomes the beating heart of the novel, and there’s something far more interesting in his role as a multi-lingual facilitator of conversation. In essence, his role holds the community together (even if at times it may be at his own expense). What does this all mean? I’m not quite sure I ever fully figured it out, but it kept me intrigued throughout the novel.
What I didn’t like
Certainly at the start of the novel, I found the fact that everybody was either already addicted to opera or became an instant devotee of the artform the second Roxane opened her mouth and started warbling to be more than a little bit of a stretch for the imagination. I had to laugh when I listened to Jarvis Cocker on Adam Buxton’s podcast describing opera as aural sandpaper or something similar, while I was reading the book. I may be a philistine on this subject, but I refuse to believe everyone in the world is so easily swayed. (Yes, I’m aware opera is also clearly a metaphor for this and that, but it still stretched plausibility!)
The coda felt a bit tacked on, and also slightly weird. I guess again it’s meant to be some metaphor about the power of a union between art and language/communication in the ruins of everything else, but as a sudden and fairly random conclusion to these characters’ stories, I didn’t love it.
Food & drink pairings
Depending on the stage of the novel, anything from lush banquetting platters to survival rations
…but mainly cigarettes
Fun facts
Patchett was inspired to write Bel Canto by watching news coverage of the 1996 Japanese Embassy Crisis in Lima, Peru, seeing the crisis presented in a manner that felt distinctly “operatic”.
Despite the novel’s immersion in the world of opera and passionate communication of its characters’ passion for the form, Patchett herself was an opera novice prior to writing the book.
The novel’s working title was How to Fall in Love with Opera, but her editor advised against it in case bookstores would mis-shelve it in their "how to" section… (might also have put me off, too)
Bel Canto was adapted into a 2018 movie of the same name by director Paul Weitz (whose other credits bizarrely include American Pie, Nutty Professor II and Little Fockers) and starring Julianne Moore as Roxanne and Ken Watanabe as Mr Hosokawa. It received fairly mixed reviews. A shame, as it felt massively cinematic as a read. I’m tempted to give it a go but the trailer is pretty high on cringe so…
It has also been adapted into an opera (inevitably) which premiered in Chicago in 2015, and parodied in the comedy series Archer in an episode arc called “Bel Panto” in which the hostage-takers are clowns. Of course.
Vanquished Foes
Anna Burns (No Bones)
Helen Dunmore (The Siege)
Maggie Gee (The White Family)
Chloe Hooper (A Child’s Book of True Crime)
Sarah Waters (Fingersmith)
Fingersmith was also Booker-shortlisted. I know a lot of people that love this so should probably give it a go one day?
2002’s Booker Prize winner was Yann Martel with the deservedly popular Life of Pi.
Context
In 2002:
Official introduction of the Euro in Eurozone countries on Jan 1st
War Crimes trial of Slobodan Milosovic begins at The Hague
Death of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother in the UK
Soham murders by Ian Huntley in Cambridgeshire, UK
Sniper attacks in Washington DC and surrounding states
Bali nightclub bombings
Suicide bombings in Mombasa, Kenya
SARS epidemic in China
Senegalese passenger ferry MV Le Joola capsizes of the Gambia, killing 1863 people
Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones
William Boyd, Any Human Heart
Minority Report
Gangs of New York
The Hours
Justin Timberlake, Justified
The Streets, Original Pirate Material
Interpol, Turn on the Bright Lights
Johnny Cash, American IV: The Man Comes Around
Life Lessons
Falling in love with someone whose future life options are somewhat limited (kill or be killed) is probably unwise
Everyone loves opera yeah?
Score
8.5
Another really strong read. Page-turning and thought-provoking. A few minor gripes knock it down the ranking a little, but still very much recommended.
I gave Martel’s 2002 Booker-winning Life of Pi 8.5, too, which in retrospect I think might have been a bit stingy.
Ranking to date:
The Idea of Perfection (2001) - Kate Grenville - 9
When I Lived in Modern Times (2000) - Linda Grant - 9
Larry’s Party (1998) - Carol Shields - 8.5
Bel Canto (2002) - Ann Patchett - 8.5
A Crime in the Neighbourhood (1999) - Suzanne Berne - 8.5
A Spell of Winter (1996) - Helen Dunmore - 8
Fugitive Pieces (1997) - Anne Michaels - 6.5
Next up
Someone nicked my next Women’s Prize reads from my doorstep, so I’m dipping into something from my shelf in the meantime, in the shape of Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace.
