Bel Canto, which means “beautiful singing” in Italian, refers to the art of classical singing in the novel, although it more precisely refers to an early romantic style of opera with a very elaborate vocal line.
A party is being given at the Vice President’s mansion in an impoverished Spanish speaking nation for a Japanese industrialist, Mr. Hosokawa, in the hope that he will locate a factory in the country. As a lure, the world’s greatest lyric soprano, Roxane Coss, an American, will give a concert at the event. Mr. Hosokawa is a fanatic opera fan and a superfan of Roxane Coss.
In fact, Hosokawa would never seriously consider locating a factory in the dysfunctional country, which is never named. He just came to hear Roxane Coss. But his presence has attracted many other high-level business leaders, since they don’t want to miss out on a suspected business opportunity.
The party is abruptly raided by terrorists, who have infiltrated via the mansion’s air conditioning ducts. Their aim is to kidnap the president of the country and hold him ransom for the release of political prisoners. But the president isn’t there, only the government’s VP. The president is home in the presidential palace watching his favorite soap opera. He had said he would be at the party but had backed out. Deprived of their main goal, kidnapping the president, the terrorists improvise and hold the whole company for ransom. The partygoers and the Vice President and his family and staff are under siege.
This story reminded me of Katherine Ann Porter’s Ship of Fools because it involves a fascinating ensemble of characters who may be in peril physically or morally and may not realize the trouble they are in. The tempo of Bel Canto also reminded me of a savings plan in a bank in its deliberate, methodical pacing. You agree to put in money every week, like in an old-fashioned Christmas Club, and eventually it pays off with a big return.
I had my doubts that the story was heading anywhere as we deal with a group of people who are pulled out of their regular lives and forced to mark time as if they were POW’s. The book seems to get a dramatic reset in its last several chapters but that’s the spiraling cumulative effect of Patchett’s methodical, disciplined narrative rhythm.
I loved the play of multiple languages in the story. There’s lots of speech being translated by Gen, a gifted multilinguist, that yields a gorgeous lexical web since few of the characters speak the same language.
The commitment to social statics in the various plot features kept piling up until I felt ready to heave. I can’t abide by traditional, reactionary novels like Bel Canto anymore, which seem too tame for our times. Bel Canto’s social philosophy isn’t any more advanced than the works of Henry James and Horatio Alger of 100 plus years ago.
I loved James’ early “social issue” novel The Princess Casamassima, published in book form in 1886, where the keynote character, Hyacinth Robinson, is born out of wedlock. His mother, of questionable repute, dies tragically in childbirth. Hyacinth is left as a disgraced orphan.
Of special interest to James is that Hyacinth is “naturally” cultivated. Despite his under-resourced background, he has a deep love for the finer things. That shouldn’t be happening in James’ conception of a civil society that requires an affluent, legitimate leisure class at the top.
Hyacinth Robinson shouldn’t exist. James makes the character more believable to his Gilded Age audience by making Hyacinth the wrong-sided son of a duke. It seems James doesn’t know what to do with the social anomaly of a working-class cultural sophisticate-except to tragically destroy him.
The issue was fresher in the 1880’s and James’ social views, undeniably elitist, are well known. I love James anyway of course, and his elitism, regarded at worst as a necessary evil, is part of why I love him. You love some writers in a spirit of complexity-because they are complex!
In Bel Canto, the enforced propinquity of the VIP guests with the underclass teens of the revolutionary cadre that holds them prisoner leads to some striking Stockholm syndrome variations. Several of the posh guests notice that some of their revolutionary teen captors have a potential that has hasn’t been tapped due to their disadvantaged background.
Roxane Coss discovers that young terrorist Cesar is so gifted vocally that he could be the world’s greatest classical singer if he is just given a chance. She undertakes to train him while she is still under captivity. A captive entrepreneur becomes attached to a promising boy terrorist who he decides to adopt when they are released. Translator Gen falls in love with Carmen, a revolutionary guard. Patchett applies the “Jamesian maneuver”, noted above with respect to the tragic Hyacinth, to these young characters. They are brutally excised from the story.
The pulpy Horatio Alger novels, as you are probably aware, involve the stories of young, deserving boys, like Ragged Dick the Match Boy, who achieve success through arduous work and the patronage of a kindly millionaire. Like in a Horatio Alger novel, some of the VIP guests in Patchett’s hostage situation have intended to sponsor some of their promising teen captors. It’s the same concept of social betterment as in Alger. It requires the patronage of the well off for peasants or the working class to have a better life.
Patronage is an expression of noblesse oblige. It reinforces the social order since it is a voluntary gift which the benefactor is under no legal or social obligation to provide. It’s like the contemporary billionaire who gives millions away to relieve world poverty-as long as he doesn’t need to pay his workers more, which would be a contractual obligation, not a gift.
I once knew an employer who contributed expensive medical care to selected favorites on his staff but who would have refused to do the same thing equitably under a health insurance plan to all his employees. Patronage is a deferral of social responsibility not a celebration of it.
The brilliance of Bel Canto as an art of singing which I love, and as the talisman for an elusive promise in Ann Patchett’s sensitive novel, does nothing to ameliorate my anger that all Patchett can come up with in the way of social insight is a derivative rehash of Henry James and Horatio Alger. Can’t we advance socially, a century later, farther than James and Alger? Let’s bring on the more radical writers!
