Beautiful and Terrible: Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
And a Ben Nevis adventure gone sideways.
Welcome to Autofictions, where I review contemporary fiction and share more about myself than anyone needs to know. In this edition: Bel Canto by Ann Patchett and a Ben Nevis adventure gone sideways.
Our brains are so adept at perceiving symmetries where none exist. Because I was reading Bel Canto the weekend J and I climbed Ben Nevis, I think of the paperback’s green and pink cover when I picture the mountain’s green slopes and purple-pink clusters of bell heather. So I’m just going to talk about both.
Ann Patchett’s symphonic novel opens with a kidnapping gone wrong, trapping a group of partygoers, including a world-famous opera singer, in the vice-presidential mansion of an unnamed Latin American country. As the guerrilla operation extends into a months-long siege, time contracts and expands with the monotony and drama of captivity, alliances form, and romances bloom. Like in any opera worth its weight in sheet music, tragedy is inevitable.
Patchett sets the stage swiftly and elegantly. The guests have assembled in honor of Katsumi Hosokawa, a Japanese titan of industry whom the host government hopes will open a manufacturing plant in the struggling country. The opera singer, Roxane Coss, has been paid lavishly to perform—Mr. Hosokawa is known to be a great lover of opera in general, and of Roxane Coss in particular. Hosokawa has no intention of building any factory; he’s come to hear Roxane sing.
When the kidnappers burst in, they are bemused to learn that their intended target, the president of the host nation, is not in attendance; he’s presciently stayed home to watch his favorite soap opera. Forced to improvise, the guests are taken hostage. The famous soprano is a suitable runner-up for their original prize.
After a slapstick start, the book comes alive in the deftness with which Patchett colors in her characters, a slow burn that becomes a blaze.
The situation is surreal from the jump. Guests flounder in tuxedos and evening gowns, taking orders from mud-streaked rebels, some no older than teenagers. Their prison is an impossibly sumptuous one. The rebels, grown bored with playing soldier, begin to acclimate to the mansion’s many comforts, applying lavender hand lotion and congregating in the TV room to watch the same soap opera that started this whole mess. The captives—all of them men except for Roxane Coss, the women and servants having been freed earlier in the siege—concoct elaborate fantasies of proposing to the soprano, except for one tender-hearted French ambassador, who sobs into his wife’s perfumed scarf.
But the tenor of their captivity becomes even more dreamlike when the generals in charge are persuaded to let Roxane resume her vocal training. Her daily performances cast a spell over captives and captors alike, rending the invisible fabric dividing the camps. Mr. Hosokawa’s virtuosic translator, Gen, falls for a beautiful guerrilla, aptly named Carmen, over midnight language lessons in a china closet. Sharing no common tongue, Hosokawa and Roxane learn to communicate love wordlessly. Unlikely bonds of friendship and kinship form across class and power divides. Everyone begins to believe they might stay in the dream forever. The reader, swept up in the spell, does too.
It can’t last, of course. For those who survive the inevitable end, it is a beautiful, terrible memory, blurred at the edges and reshaped in the recollection. In the quickness and violence with which it unfolds, Bel Canto’s finale breaks your heart.
A very different set of plans went sideways in early August when J and I spent my birthday hiking Ben Nevis. Its most popular route, the Mountain Track, winds some 10 miles and 4,400 feet through woodland, past a shimmering loch, up the mountain’s stony west flank to a cairn-dotted summit. I could think of no better way to ring in another year than with aching calves and a sweeping view of the Highlands. But the best-laid plans…
As we set off, a light drizzle—Scottish hospitality—glossed the thickets of eagle fern and bell heather that lined the trailhead. Having checked the forecast obsessively in the week before the hike, we were prepared for this. But the weather turned increasingly hostile on the ascent. The gentle rain gave way to a driving downpour, then hail. Fog rolled in as the trail wove past the snaking drop of the Steall Falls, misty and ethereal at first, then thick as woodsmoke.
By the time we reached the dome of loose volcanic rock a mile or so from the summit, my muscles were buzzing with the cold and visibility was nonexistent. So much for a leisurely picnic overlooking the ridges of the surrounding Munros. Instead, at the trig station that marks the mountain’s highest point, we snapped a miserable, blue-lipped selfie, shoved a couple of half-frozen Trek bars into our faces, and turned around.
Bad became worse on the descent. I was cold, damn it, and soaked. Impatient to pass a group of hikers on a narrow part of the trail, I scrambled over a slippery slab of rock, lost my footing, and somersaulted hard onto my knees. The fall only left a few bruises—wrists, knees, ego—but I was dazed by a bout of vertigo that left my vision swirling and overbright.
This has happened to me before, and the only thing to do is to sit still until it passes. Which is not really an option when you’re already shivering so hard your jaw sounds like a set of wind-up chattering teeth. J and I perched on the trail’s edge until my vision settled a little. He guided me by the arm for the next mile while I regained my footing, procured another, much-needed energy bar from my waterlogged pack, and wrapped me in his fleece.
The rain decided to let up just around then. The sun even broke through the slate-colored clouds for a second. Suddenly, it was like the last four hours hadn’t happened. Here, again, was the sinuous Steall waterfall; here was the silver pool of the Halfway Lochan, nestled in the saddle between Ben Nevis and the Meall an t-Suidhe. By the time we’d clapped our hands around paper cups of coffee at the Visitors’ Centre at the base of the mountain, we were laughing.
It was beautiful and terrible, and now that it’s over, memory has blurred its edges into something almost transcendent. So much so that I’m already pestering J with plans for our next adventure, to the Snowdon range in Wales. Wish us luck.