Bel Canto

Ann Patchett

I have spent quite a while mulling this over, and have finally come to the conclusion that, patterned after Greek tragic opera or not, I can't forgive Ann Patchett for the climax of this novel. Much of that has to do with the beginning of the novel; I'd have been inclined to be more forgiving had the first hundred pages not moved at a snail's pace. But the book finally picked up, everything was going along swimmingly, and then, suddenly, bam—the most predictable possible climax.

The story is based on accounts of the guerrilla takeover of the Peruvian embassy in 1992, but Patchett moves the action to another, unnamed, South American country and adds a few extra ingredients into the mix. In Patchett's story, opera singer Roxane Coss has been lured to the embassy for the birthday party of a wealthy Japanese industrialist whom the country hopes will build a factory there. During the festivities, the guerrillas invade, and a hostage situation begins. It drags on, and soon the strict militarism with which the siege begins evolves into a more relaxed system, where the line between terrorist and hostage begins to blur.

It's after that line begins to blur that the book really takes hold. The original three chapters, that describe the scene and introduce us to most of the main characters, are painfully slow. Patchett hits her stride, and the book takes off. For the middle two hundred pages, it's easy to see why the book won the Orange Prize and was shortlisted for so many others.

Then comes the climax. My initial reaction is that it was the biggest letdown I'd had in a novel in a number of years, and that's saying something. After some discussion, I tried to accept it as the pace and events of the book being modeled on Greek tragic opera (where such clichés as the climax of this novel were coined). I don't know enough about Greek tragic opera to really make a judgment one way or the other as to the accuracy of Patchett's patterning. I do know that in modern reinterpretations of older works (think Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres for an excellent example), what we often change is what has become clichéd in the years since the work was originally written. Such is not the case here, and it certainly kept me from enjoying the book as a whole as much as I otherwise would have.

Great middle. Mediocre beginning. Awful ending. Still, the hundred pages that are worth saving are remarkable, and worth the price of admission.