Bell Canto by Ann Patchett

The book begins with a dinner party, thrown in the home of the vice president of a South American nation that is never named. The president of the nation was supposed to be present at the dinner party, but opted not to come because it would mean missing his favorite telenovela. Unfortunately, a group of armed terrorists from the jungle fail to learn of the president's absence, and when they break into the dinner party in the hopes of kidnapping the president, they instead find themselves with a household of hostages and their plan devolves into something else entirely.

In reality, the terrorists are little more than boys, led by three older generals who desperately want to right what they feel are injustices that have been done to their family and people. Believing, or hoping, that they have the upper hand, they hold onto the hostages, and hours drag into days, then weeks, and even months. And while the relationship between the captives and captors is an uneasy one, bonds develop and lives change.

Bel Canto is a beautifully written book. But that’s actually the problem. At times as I read, I suspected that Bel Canto, while beautifully written, was actually written to be beautiful, and that nagging suspicion got in the way of my completely letting go and losing myself in the novel.

But that being said, I’m still going to give the book a good review. The story engaged me, the characters interested me, and the novel was very well-crafted. What I loved most about the book was the way in which the reader’s relationship with the characters and with the storyline developed in tandem with the experiences of the characters themselves. The opening scenes were filled with unnamed persons, each one earning a sentence here, a paragraph there, and creating a picture of a very believable confusion. Some of these characters are released early on, or never have an important role, but others come into focus over the course of the novel, and we learn to care about them as they themselves come to know and care about each other. The story never leaves the home, and as readers we are caught in the same surreal life that the hostages and hostage-takers find themselves in, cut off from almost any knowledge of the world outside of the house. There were story elements that my logical mind wanted to have a hard time buying into, but these were woven so seamlessly and believably into the storytelling that I found myself almost immersed in the world that Patchett had created, even if that little nagging feeling at the back of my head kept me from diving all the way in.

For me, one of the most interesting aspects of the story was that we are told the end nearly from the beginning. I didn’t realize what an interesting choice this was for Patchett to make until nearly the end. Because Patchett tells us, almost offhandedly, what is going to happen within the first few minutes of the novel, the story is never driven by a suspense about how things will end. Rather, the story itself resides in the details and in the moment-to-moment existence of the hostages and their captors. This is completely appropriate to the situation of the prisoners, cut off from the world, and, in many ways, from a normal linear existence. The story is something of a dream-like interlude, but at the same time it feels completely real and believable. Or at least believable enough.