Published 2001 / Length 318 pages
Mr Hosokawa, an influential business leader, reluctantly attends a presidential party in his honour in an unnamed Latin American country – agreeing to do so only because his favourite opera singer has been booked to perform for him. After Roxane Coss’s last song, the lights go out and strangers storm the party in search of the President, whom they mean to kidnap. But the President isn’t there. Their rapid in-out operation turns into a prolonged siege. Through close studies of the characters involved, Patchett delineates superbly the anatomy of the siege situation, showing how people and relationships evolve when they are forced to act collectively. Character is exposed. Friendships develop. Love comes to call. But in the streets outside, so far away from this strange temporary utopia, the authorities are moving inexorably to force the siege to its inevitable end.
‘I really felt that I could relate to so many characters, because they were so sympathetically drawn. I was completely taken with this novel.’– JANET, 45
• Can a novel like this alter the way in which we judge events in the real world – for instance, the Beslan school tragedy? Or should the siege in Bel Canto be viewed merely as a literary device used to bring together a disparate group of characters?
• The book begins with two epigraphs, which enhance our appreciation of the novel as a whole. One of them is unattributed: it is from the libretto for Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute. In what ways do these epigraphs relate to the main body of the story?
• Patchett introduces many different characters and narrative perspectives. Given this, how successful is she in sustaining the pace of the plot?
• How does Patchett coax the reader into questioning or even undoing normative judgements about ‘the authorities’ versus ‘terrorists’? How well does she achieve this?
• Patchett based her fiction on fact. In Peru, a few years before Bel Canto’s publication, a siege lasted for months when terrorists took hostage 400 people in an ambassadorial house.
• ‘Bel canto’, ‘beautiful singing’ in Italian, is a vocal style with full operatic tones that requires a versatile or even a virtuoso technique.
• In 2002, Bel Canto won both the Orange Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award.
• Music & Silence by ROSE TREMAIN and An Equal Music by VIKRAM SETH – beautiful storytelling with musical themes.
• The Good Terrorist by DORIS LESSING – shifting narrative perspectives and a challenge to readers’ perceptions.
• The Feast of the Goat by MARIO VARGAS LLOSA – a magnificent, multi-voiced work with one narrative line focusing on a group of assassins, which also takes place in Latin America.
• Terrorist by JOHN UPDIKE – a more recent example of a writer trying to understand somebody else’s utterly alien point of view.