This quiz is about the novel, Bel Canto.

(2)

Title: Danger Arias

Author(s): Alex Clark

Publication Details: Guardian. (July 14, 2001):

Source: Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol. 244. Detroit: Gale. From Literature Resource Center.

Document Type: Critical essay

Full Text:

[(review date 14 July 2001) In the following review of Bel Canto, Clark praises Patchett for her narrative range and well-drawn characters.]

Transfixed by the hijack of the Japanese embassy in Lima five years ago, Ann Patchett decided that it lacked one thing--an opera singer. In this ensuing rendition of life under siege, [Bel Canto,] she corrects the deficit, but although her version of real-life events is frequently fantastical and defiantly romantic, the playfulness of artistic licence doesn't lead to a novel as light-hearted as its setup suggests.

World-famous soprano Roxane Coss has been tempted to a small Latin American country against her better judgment, the lure of big bucks obscuring her characteristic fastidiousness. She herself is the bait for an even bigger fish: opera fanatic Katsumi Hosokawa, founder and president of a cash-rich electronics company, for whom the "host country" (as it is always described) is throwing a birthday party in the hope of attracting investment. As Roxane's final aria concludes, the lights in the vice-president's palatial home flicker and die, and terrorists swarm over the black-tie clad, turbot-eating dignitaries. As overtures to novels go, this one is pretty electrifying.

Like that of her heroine, Patchett's great talent in Bel Canto is one of range. With bravura confidence and inventiveness she varies her pace to encompass both lightning flashes of brutality and terror and long stretches of incarcerated ennui. The novel's sensibilities extend from the sly wit of observational humour to subtle, mournful insights into the nature of yearning and desire. Like the blueprint of operatic performance that she has imported, Patchett slides from strutting camp to high tragedy, minute social comedy to sublime romanticism.

After an initial period fraught with tension and danger--including an extraordinary description of the lingering death of Roxane's diabetic accompanist--the kidnapped household soon develops its own more peaceful rhythms. The terrorists have failed in their mission before they've even begun: their real target, the country's Japanese-born president, had stayed home on the crucial night; ostensibly to attend to "matters of Israel", actually to watch his favourite soap opera. Soon the kidnappers themselves, enchanted by the grandeur of their surroundings, are also hooked on the TV drama, fitting their half-hearted drills around it or wandering through the house eating pistachio nuts and sniffing hand lotion.

Deprived of their intended prize, the revolutionary generals are revealed as men without a plan, their only remaining chance the continuing abduction of the soprano. Soon they find themselves running around to satisfy her every whim, procuring for her dental floss, a muffler, herbal throat lozenges. Holding them to ransom with the threat of non-performance, Roxane demands score after score, and thereafter works another spell on the household, trilling arias for hours on end.

The trick is ingenious: a hijack in which the captors have nowhere to go and the hostages have no desire for release. For Mr Hosokawa, proximity to his idol is a dream come true, surpassed when they begin a tentative relationship; for his loyal translator Gen, captivity is also unexpectedly liberating. The only polyglot present, he must attend to translations both major and minor almost all the time; voicing the captors' demands and the captives' physical and emotional needs to one another, he finds his role as communicator similar to Roxane's. And in the quiet darkness of a china cupboard, he also finds romantic fulfilment in the arms of a terrorist aptly named Carmen.

If Roxane and Mr Hosokawa, Gen and Carmen are the novel's premier cast, they are superbly supported by the rest of the ensemble. Patchett's stereotypical foreigners evoke humour rather than glibness: the uxorious Frenchman, Simon Thibault, weeping into his wife's stole; the Swiss hostage negotiator dressed in suit and tie, looking "very much like an earnest representative of an American religion"; the chain-smoking Russian, Fyodorov, regaling Roxane with mournful and meandering childhood stories and unrequited love. In the becalmed sections of her narrative, Patchett has the space and capacity to animate each of these lives and more, and the deftness to tuck them neatly into the story as a whole.

Opera demands a tragic ending, and Bel Canto draws inexorably to a conclusion that neither captors nor captives foresee or desire. Outside, in a real world to which we are never admitted, a megaphone threatens to drown out Roxane's exquisite singing with a voice that from the very beginning "raged, loud and distorted as if it had bubbled up from the ocean floor". Throughout, allusions to the future cleverly keep individual fates mysterious; we know there will be a "later", but are denied the knowledge of who will live to see it.

At the start of the novel, Roxane is singing, at Mr Hosokawa's request, the aria from Dvorák's Rusalka, in which a mermaid falls in love with a mortal. If she herself becomes mortal, then she loses her power of speech and becomes instead a spirit of death. The opera takes place on the border between spring and summer, and in the novel too the captives live through the drizzly, misty days of the garua, which renders the passage of time irrelevant. When the garua lifts, so must Roxane's spell, and then the novel will end. Whom the spirit of death alights upon is concealed until the penultimate chapter, and when it is revealed, the narrative returns to a shocking brutality. If the bathetic conclusion of the epilogue disappoints, it is unsurprising but nonetheless lamentable. The house's bemused inmates are not alone in hoping that the spell would never end.

Source Citation (MLA 7th Edition)

Clark, Alex. "Danger Arias." Guardian (14 July 2001). Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol. 244. Detroit: Gale, 2008. Literature Resource Center. Web. 2 Apr. 2014.