Bel Canto, by Ann Patchett

“Catchy, but with some wrong notes.”

In Bel Canto, literary luminary Ann Patchett sets the Stockholm Syndrome to music.  An unnamed South American country has lured uber-successful Japanese businessman Katsumi Hosokawa to their Vice-Presidential manse for his birthday in the hopes that the foreign magnate will grace them with his latest electronics factory.  To get Hosokawa to accept the invite, the government hires Roxane Coss, the world’s greatest soprano, to serenade Hosokawa at the party, as his heart has burned for opera since childhood.  Unfortunately, on her final note, the lights go out.  Guerillas take control of the compound, and a hostage situation sets in for the next four and half months.

Patchett appears to take a similar approach to crafting stories as Stephen King: put characters in a messy situation and watch what they do to try to get out of it.  In this case, the unexpected occurs.  The community becomes an idyll.  “Stockholm Syndrome” refers to a dynamic where hostages develop affection for their captors, but here, fuzzies go all around.  Hosokawa falls in love with his soprano.  His polyglot factotum, Gen Watanabe (Ken Watanabe plays Hosokawa in the movie adaptation), lives out a 2 a.m. romance with one of the young guerrillas, Carmen—turns out the rebels take a gender equity approach to terrorist acts.  Another Japanese businessman reveals his secret obsession for practicing piano to become Coss’ stand-in accompanist.  The bearded jungle generals play chess with their captives.  The underage guards hold soccer matches with the hostages.  Above all, Coss’ singing gilds the cage, filling time with dulcet tones that makes captivity for hostages and guerrillas alike, utopic.

Being opera, you know the story won’t end well, and in case you’ve never heard one, Patchett tells what to expect from the get-go, so don’t hope for a happy ending.

The book has much to like.  Unlike much of contemporary literature, this novel possesses a plot, with honest-to-goodness character arcs.  In fact, Patchett manages to imbue all the roles with dimensionality, including the minor personae who by rights should be holding spears at the sides of the stage.  You become invested in the song of love that the pages sing.  You really do.

At the same time, some of the notes hurt the ears.  For instance, Bel Canto indulges in ethnic stereotype.  The Japanese come across as agoraphobic worker ants.  The Russians chain smoke while telling interminable, self-indulgent stories.  The French hostage finds solace in the kitchen, where he cooks for the community while wearing his wife’s blue scarf.  The Latin generals cut laughable figures who could have come out of Woody Allen’s film spoof of the revolutionario archetype, Bananas.  The country’s Vice President devolves into a house servant, replete with a dustpan, and finds that he likes it. 

Please note that book’s premise itself does not pose a barrier.  The idea of normal people falling for opera might seem incongruous, but it isn’t.  When Coss cannot stand not practicing after the first two weeks, she breaks into new artistic heights, “Roxane Coss sang as if she were saving the life of every person in the room. She sang as if she had never known fear.  She sang as if she had never been alone.”  During grad school #1, I took three years of singing lessons with a soprano named Wendy Lee Tedmon, who emitted a similar universal harmonic of spirit to go along with an otherworldly voice.  Like Coss, everyone loved Wendy Lee too.  Serving as the channel for ethereal beauty makes an impact.

However, the book’s verisimilitude itself raises a deeper flaw.  Reader reviews on websites like Goodreads noticed something that professional critics for the most part either missed or chose to ignore.  Patchett bases Bel Canto on a real-life event in 1996 in Peru, in which guerillas took control of the Japanese ambassador’s home for 126 days, with a blood-filled outcome.  Nevertheless, Patchett elides any mention of Peru, instead using varied synonyms of “godforsaken” to refer to the host country.  The sweltering tropical imaginary thus serves as a set for characters from wealthy nations to play out their fantasies.  With this knowledge in mind, the book seems insensitive, at best, and perhaps offensive to a people who continue to grapple with the trauma of a difficult history.

Also, Patchett includes an epilogue that seems not just unnecessary but derails the trajectory of the book.  If you read Bel Canto, skip the afterward—advice I’ve never given before.

I appreciate how Patchett considers the audience by posing a question that the story seeks to answer: how do opposing sides create a new kind of community in an extreme situation?  I furthermore buy the premise that, despite the horror of hostage taking, in many respects the characters on some level come to wish for their captivity to never end.  Above all, the characters in Bel Canto become real, which feels compelling and perhaps accounts for why Hollywood made a movie out of it.

However, the novel’s appropriation of another culture’s tragedy as a set piece strikes a dissonant chord I can’t unhear.  In the end, Bel Canto uses a caricature of a faraway “exotic” country for the purposes of concocting a “once upon a time” Western fantasy, perpetuating a malpractice endemic to the history of opera itself.