Steve Reads

I did a really bad job the other day explaining what Bel Canto is all about. Let me see if I can do a better job at it now, having finished it and been blown away by it.

First of all, I should just mention the visceral reaction the book caused in me. It is a tragedy, in large part because you know from the start what’s going to happen to everyone. I think it’s the measure of a great book that you know its destiny but you’re always hoping that somehow the cards will fall differently. (This is an especially good measure of the strength of a nonfiction book. I call out for your attention The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes and Abraham Lincoln by David Herbert Donald. My heart was racing as the bomb flew to its delivery point above Hiroshima while reading Rhodes’s book, and as I read Donald’s I hoped against hope that Lincoln wouldn’t be assassinated.)

The premise of Bel Canto is that a group of terrorists in an unnamed South American country has taken over the vice-presidential mansion during a state dinner in order to capture and ransom the president. The president, however, is at home watching his favorite television drama, the viewing of which cannot be interrupted under any circumstances. So the terrorists — who executed the takeover perfectly otherwise — are wondering what to do with the 200 dinner guests. All they wanted was the president; the mission was supposed to be over in minutes.

Guests and terrorists settle in for a long standoff. A Swiss diplomat delivers food every day, but otherwise the house loses contact with the outside and becomes its own world. One of the terrorists — a girl who at first pretended to be a boy, perhaps to get more respect from the hostages — asks one of the hostages (a professional translator) to teach her Spanish. A young terrorist boy watches the daily chess games between one of the generals and one of the hostages, and eventually gets up the nerve to ask if he can play this mysterious game whose rules he’s only learned by watching. (The general only speaks Spanish, and his opponent only speaks Japanese, so no one bothers to explain the rules to onlookers.) The guest of honor at the dinner is a Japanese businessman, Mr. Hosokawa, whom the South American country hopes will build a factory there. For his birthday, they’ve brought his favorite opera singer, an American woman named Roxane Coss (the single ‘n’ in ‘Roxane’ is sic). She speaks only English.

So one of the first things to note is the relatively small number of characters. There are perhaps only six characters whom we should care about in this book, and each is drawn exquisitely.

Next is that this world is entirely fantastical within the house, yet the reader completely forgets about it. In particular, the reader quickly forgets that there are any hostages in the house; it seems that they’re all just having a fun time hearing the opera singer sing, learning new languages, and so forth. We forget the real world (not only the real real world, but the real world inside the book) just as the characters do.

That’s why I find Patchett’s book such a marvel. It’s built on virtually nothing. It is built purely on the hopes of the reader and the characters — that despite all appearances, we may for just a moment be able to build a world that violates everything we know about reality. And yet within that unreality, Patchett creates the most wonderful, lifelike characters. It’s as though the people are all real, and they’re all doing real things that real people would do, and yet the world has been subtly altered — so subtly that you never would have guessed anything changed.

When the imaginary world that the characters have built comes tumbling down, it is perhaps the most heartbreaking couple pages I have ever read. Like I said, the reader knows that it’s coming, the characters — in some remote part of their brains — know that it’s coming, and yet that knowledge doesn’t lessen its force at all. Have you ever had a fling that you knew wasn’t going anywhere, but about which you managed to delude yourself into dreams of lifelong perfection? That is the sustained note of this book.

Roxane Coss is central to the book, as the one reason that everyone bonds. Even though the terrorists have spent their lives in the jungle, most are illiterate and none speak Italian, they all somehow know the heartache in the words that Roxane sings. There are at least six languages represented among the hostages and terrorists, and the only one who can speak them all is Mr. Hosokawa’s translator. Most everyone must settle for routes other than language — music, lovemaking, games of chess, or pure emotion. Among lesser authors, this would be a trite and hackneyed device; Ms. Patchett turns it into a completely believable instrument for people to cycle through all the emotions that one would feel when cooped up with dozens of other people for months: love and laughter and resentment and wounded pride and frustration and an indefinable claustrophia. The music carries all of this, believably. This book needs to be turned into a movie, but only a movie that could weave the lightest, gentlest, and most complicated of soundtracks amidst the subtlest acting. These are not characters; they are real people listening to music that keeps them alive. It would take the deftest directing hand, and I’m not sure anyone is up to the task. Books or movies that traffic in real human yearning are few and far between. Bel Canto is one such book.