I am not a great lover of fiction. A novel, to really get my attention, to truly engage me, has to grab me by the throat emotionally, and this is crucial for me, must also in some way have woven into it an aura of mystery or redemption and the rediscovery of the self. Two novels that have done this for me in the past were the first three quarters of Barbara Kingsolver's Poisonwood Bible, and Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones. So too, though on a lesser scale, does Bel Canto by Anne Patchett.
Bel Canto is the story of a meticulously planned birthday party that suddenly, and irrevocably, goes very wrong when political rebels, some little more than children, take over the vice presidential palace in an unnamed South American country. It is not hard to guess where the author drew her inspiration. I was quickly put in mind of a similar event that took place in Peru some years ago. But inspiration is but a starting point, and had the author simply followed the straight line of inspiration, we would be talking about just another adventure story; easily told and quickly forgotten. Instead Patchett, from the very first page, slowly ushers us into what seems a dreamscape, using words which ache with an inner languid music, and produce a surreal world which flows smooth as a silk laden liquid into our minds.
Despite the slow, almost effortless, pace of the majority of the novel, during which we are not sure how much, or even if, time is passing, the story starts, for obvious reasons, with a bang. And finally, for just as obvious reasons, it ends with a bang. In between these two points the book lulls us into trance, as the standoff between the rebels and the government goes on--and on. The characters cease being merely characters, and become humans awash, as all humans are, in tangled relationships. Bonds are formed; captives with captives and captives with captors. Music, both physical and intangible is played both within the story itself, and on the pages, where it flows through the carefully orchestrated choice of words. Secrets are shared. Love, both old and newly discovered, is given and received, as reality shifts to a waking dream, and the reader enters a twilight zone where it is possible to hope, against all reason, that time, and the reality of the outside world will remain suspended, allowing the world the author has created to flow on without measure and without end.
It doesn't of course. Everything has time limits. And few book endings satisfy me. I suppose this is because by the last few pages of a good novel, the reader has made the events their own, and demands, however unconsciously, that the events portrayed resolve, to their own satisfaction. And how can any author even hope to meet the personal hopes of so many?
Most can't.
Bel Canto both delivers in its ending and fails. It delivers in the sense that given the world we live in, it could end no other way. It fails for me because it left me both unsatisfied and a bit unsettled, denying as I did the ending that I knew was coming closer and closer with each turned page. Still, one must after all, be prepared for an abrupt return to the real world after dwelling in such a magical and surreal one. We can only remain airborne with Peter en route to Neverland for so long, until the flight itself begins to erode our belief, no matter how talented the tale teller is.
I wish that it could be otherwise, because with some stories, as in life, it is hard to give up the desire for a magical place of safety and satiety. A place where one can, day after day, dream of, and create, a perfect world out of one which is patently anything but. But endings, as they say, happen, and while we may want to be suspended forever, sooner or later the landing comes, either feather soft with a whisper of hope for future flights as in Lovely Bones, or hard and crashing and full of questions of the worth of the future as in Bel Canto.
I cannot stop here without mentioning another book which I am presently reading. The House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski isn't a hard book to read. The sentences are clear and self explanatory. But yet, last night when I reached page 179 I found myself impossibly and completely lost and realized that I must, if I wished to ever finish, begin again on page 1. Or must I? And is finishing ever really possible? I dont know.
The book, which tells the story of a maze discovered within a house, is also itself a physical and textural maze which mirrors the story maze. And in honesty I am not sure, even as I diligently plan to start over on page 1, that I will ever emerge from either story or book. In fact it strikes me as quite possible that I will wander these pages forever with frustration at the constant wrong turns I am forced into by the writing and the textual design-- as opposed to the events of the story.
What IS this book? I have literally no idea what to call it. Reality in life and in stories is, as we know, subjective. Mr. Danielewski has presented us with a situation where the physical make up of a book is just as subject to one's own mind--and quite capable of entrapping the reader forever.
Do I recommend this to you to read--or should I say experience? I don't know. Certainly the book, which contains not one picture, is well worth at least looking through. My guess it hat it will prove overwhelmingly frustrating to most--including perhaps eventually to myself.
As another author put it--far better than I can:
"This demonically brilliant book is impossible to put down, ignore, or persuasively conclude reading. In fact when you may reach a certain page and find me there, reduced in size like Vincent Price The Fly, still trapped in its malicious, beautiful pages."
Jonathan Letham