Bel Canto by Ann Patchett

Every now and again I read a book that makes such an impression on me that I want to give copies to all my friends. Patchett’s Bel Canto is one of them, a novel ostensibly about the effect of a lengthy kidnap saga in an unnamed South American country, but which covers tragedy and high drama, romance and the redeeming qualities of opera.

A powerful Japanese businessman is persuaded to visit the unnamed country when the president manages to book the man’s favourite opera soprano, Roxanne Coss, to sing at a party in his honour. As the house lights go out at the end of her performance, a motley band of terrorists storm the house, looking for the president. Unfortunately, their target is at home, watching his favourite telenovela. Their plan in disarray, the terrorists take everyone hostage and a siege lasting several months ensues.

Patchett is unsparing in the violence that accompanies the armed group’s entrance, but as the standoff between the three ringleaders (‘the generals’) and the government outside develops into stalemate, the occupants of the house, both hostage and hostage-taker, find themselves adapting to their new life, trapped in the luxurious home of the vice-president. Illicit relationships quietly flourish; Roxanne Coss begins to sing again, enchanting the occupants of the house; the foot soldiers, barely older than children, begin to warm to their prisoners and vice versa. Now allowed the luxury of time for introspection, many re-evaluate their lives. French Ambassador, Simon Thibault, devotes his thoughts to his wife, safely on the other side of the vice presidential compound. His uxoriousness is ever present (as is her discarded shawl, which he keeps wrapped around his neck at all times) and he finds himself thinking about Edith even when he’s trying to make supper for nearly sixty people, without being allowed to use knives, or even obtain that ubiquitous ingredient in French cuisine, wine:

“What about a simple coq au vin?” Thibault said. “They confiscated all the vin,” Ruben said. “We could always send Gen out for another request. It’s probably locked up around here somewhere unless they drank it all.” “No vin,” Simon Thibault said sadly, as if it were something dangerous, as if it were a knife. How impossible. In Paris one could be careless, one could afford to run out completely because anything you wanted was half a block away, a case, a bottle, a glass. a glass of Burgundy in the autumn at a back table at Brasserie Lipp, the light warm and yellowed where it reflected off the brass railings around the bar. Edith in her navy sweater, her hair pulled back and twisted into a casual knot, her pale hands cupping the bowl of the glass. how clearly he can see it, the light, the sweater, the dark red of the wine beneath Edith’s fingers. When they moved to the Heart of Darkness they had wine shipped two dozen cases at a time, enough wine to quench an entire city through a drought. Thibault tried to make a cellar out of what was merely a wet dirt basement. French wine was the cornerstone of French diplomacy. He handed it out like peppermints. Guests stayed later at their parties. They stood forever on the walk that led down to the gate and said good night, good night, but never seemed to leave. Edith would finally go inside and bring them each a bottle, press it into their resisting hands. Then they scattered into the darkness, each back to his or her car and driver, holding the prize. “This is my blood.” Thibault raised his glass to his wife when the guests had finally gone.” It will be shed for you and for no men.”

The siege can’t last forever, of course, and the end when it comes is as tragic as the operas that Roxanne sings so beautifully.

Ordinary Thunderstorms by Willam Boyd

What happens when your whole life changes in an afternoon? Everything you own, even your reputation and very identity, are taken away from you in an instant, leaving you hunted and hiding in the anonymity of London. In Boyd’s thriller about big pharmaceutical business, this is exactly what happens to Adam Kindred when he is framed for the murder of a whistleblower.

Realising that this isn’t going to look good with the law, Adam puts off calling the police and instead makes his way back to the hotel he’s staying in, stopping in a pub on the way:

Adam asked directions to Pimlico and set off, once sure of where he should be heading. On his way there he found a pub, reassuringly mediocre – indeed, as if ‘average’ subsumed all its ambitions: an averagely stained patterned carpet, middle-of-the-road muzak playing, three gaming machines pinging and gonging away not too loudly, a shabby-looking blue-collar clientele, a perfectly acceptable number of beers available and unexceptionable pub food on offer – pies, sandwiches and a dish of the day (smearily erased). Adam felt oddly reassured by this pointed decision to settle for the accepted norm, to strive for nothing higher than the tolerable median. He would remember this place. He ordered a large whisky with ice and a pack of peanuts, took his drink to a table in the corner and began to reflect... Adam drank his whisky and consumed his peanuts with a velocity and hunger that surprised him, emptying the packet into his cupped palm and tipping the nuts carelessly into his mouth in an almost ape-like way (stray peanuts bouncing off the table top in front of him). The packet was empty in seconds, crumpled and placed on the table where it cracklingly tried to uncrumple itself for a further few seconds, while Adam picked up and ate the individual peanuts that had escaped his immediate furious appetite. He wondered, as he savoured the salty, waxy peanut taste, if there were a more nutritious or satisfying foodstuff on the planet – sometimes salted peanuts were all that man required.

Unfortunately for Adam, this is a problem that is going to require more than whisky and bar snacks...

The Collector by John Fowles

Lonely and socially inept, Frederick Clegg works as a clerk in a town hall and collects butterflies as a hobby. Relieved off his life of drudgery by a huge win on the football pools, Fred decides to collect another specimen, young art student Miranda, whom he has obsessed about for years.

Locking her up in the cellar of his new home deep in the Sussex countryside, Frederick thinks that she will fall in love with him and be his wife, but the plan quickly unravels as the unfortunate object of his desire finds him brutal, boring and a raging philistine to boot. She doesn’t even like his collection of butterflies, finding them macabre and anti-life.

Fowles divides the book into two parts, the first half portraying Frederick’s painful self-justification as he asserts, quite reasonably (at least to himself), that he has done the right thing in capturing his ideal woman. To the reader, it is obvious that Miranda is desperate to escape, and will try anything to get him to let her go, even seduction:

Well she went up to her bath and it was all like as usual. When she came out I did her hands, no gag, and I followed her downstairs. I noticed she had a lot of her French scent on, she’d done her hair up the way she did it before, and she was wearing a purple and white housecoat I bought her. She wanted some of the sherry we never finished (there was still half a bottle there) and I poured it out and she stood by the log fire looking down into it, holding out her bare feet turn by turn to warm them. We stood there drinking; we didn’t say anything but she gave me one or two funny looks, like she knew something I didn’t and that made me nervous. Well she had another glass, and drank it off in a minute and then wanted another. “Sit down,” she said, so I sat down on the sofa where she pointed. For a moment she watched me sitting there. Then she stood in front of me, very funny, looking down at me, moving from foot to foot. The she came, twist, bang she sat on my knees. It took me right by surprise. Somehow she got her arms right round my head and the next thing she was kissing me at the mouth. Then laying her head on my shoulder.

Despite the fortifying effects of fortified wine, Miranda is on a hiding to nothing. Fred’s interests are more voyeuristic than physical, and the plan doesn’t come off. The second half of the book collects a rough diary that Miranda makes of her imprisonment. She dubs Frederick Caliban, (he in turn renames himself Ferdinand, although he is completely unaware of the allusions to The Tempest), and the sheer cruelty of what he has done to her is shown here in much sharper relief. Her attempt at seduction is clearly a desperate act:

I dolled myself up after the bath. Oceans of Mitsouko. I stood in front of the fire, showing my bare feet for his benefit. I was nervous. I didn’t know if I could go through with it. and having my hands bound. But I had three glasses of sherry quickly. I shut my eyes and went to work. I made him sit down and then I sat down on his lap. He was so stiff, so shocked, that I had to go on. If he’d clutched at me, perhaps I’d have stopped. I let the housecoat fall open, but he just sat there with me on his lap. As if we had never met before and this was some silly party game. Two strangers at a party, who didn’t much like each other. In a nasty perverted way it was exciting. A woman-in-me reaching to the man-in-him. I can’t explain, it was also the feeling that he didn’t know what to do. That he was a sheer virgin. There was an old lady of Cork who took a young priest for a walk. I must have been drunk.

Fowles was a master of psychological suspense (his novel The Magus is equally powerful and disturbing) but it’s clear from the start that this isn’t going to end well.

All Quiet On The Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque

Its obligatory place on the school reading list meant that I first read Remarque’s devastating novel about the German experience in the Great War when I was fourteen. Over twenty years later it feels far more poignant; the young soldiers of nineteen seemed impossibly adult back then, they don’t now.

The story follows Paul Bäumer and three of his friends from school who join up at the behest of their schoolmaster. All now nineteen, they are trying to survive in the hell that is the Western Front, under constant bombardment and the threat of sniper fire, not to mention the periodic sorties across no-man’s-land in futile attempt to seize a few more square yards of land from the other side.

Relieved from active service at the front for a few days they are staying behind their lines in a French village. Swimming in the river one day, they attract the attention of three local women who indicate that they might want to bring some food around to their house that evening... A bit of Dutch courage is needed first, and to shake off one of their pals:

No one can cross the bridge without leave, so we will simply have to swim over tonight. We are full of excitement. We cannot last without a drink, so we go to the canteen where there is beer and a kind of punch. We drink punch and tell one another lying games of our experiences. Each man gladly believes the other man’s story, only waiting impatiently till he can cap it with a taller tale. Our hands are fidgety, we smoke countless cigarettes, until Kropp says: “We might as well take them a few cigarettes too.” So we put some inside our caps to keep them. The sky turns apple green. There are four of us, but only three can go; we must shake off Tjaden, so ply him with rum and punch until he rocks.  As it turns dark we go to our billets. Tjaden in the centre. We are glowing and full of a lost for adventure. The little brunette is mine, we have settled all that. Tjaden drops on his sack of straw and snores. Once he wakes up and grins so craftily that we are alarmed and begin to think that he is cheating, and that we have given him the punch to no purpose. Then he drops back again and sleeps on.

The evening is a success, although Paul leaves depressed. Later, he is given two weeks leave and makes his way back home. He makes the mistake of falling in with some of his old school masters and accepting a smoke. After the reality of the front, their enthusiasm for the war is shocking:

Unfortunately, I have accepted the cigar, so I have to remain. And they are all so dripping with good will that it is impossible to object. All the same, I feel annoyed and smoke like a chimney as hard as I can. In order to make at least some show of appreciation I toss off the beer in one gulp. Immediately a second is ordered; people know how much they are indebted to the soldiers. They argue about what we ought to annex. The head-master with the steel watch-chain wants to have at least the whole of Belgium, the coal-areas of France, and a slice of Russia. He produces reasons why we must have them and is quite inflexible until at last the others give in to him. Then he beings to expound just whereabouts in France the break-through must come, and turns to me: “Now, shove ahead a bit there with your everlasting trench warfare – Smash through the johnnies and then there will be peace.” In reply that in our opinion a break-through may not be possible. The enemy may have too many reserves. Besides, the war may be rather different from what people think. He dismisses the idea loftily and informs me I know nothing about it. “The details, yes,” says he, “But this relates to the whole. And of that you are not able to judge. You see only your little sector and so you cannot have any general survey. You do your duty, you risk your lives, that deserves the highest honour – every man on you ought to have the Iron Cross – but first of all the enemy line must be broken through in Flanders and then rolled up from the top.” He blows his nose and wipes his beard. “Completely rolled up they must be, from the top to the bottom. And then to Paris.” I would like to know how he pictures it to himself, and pour the third glass of beer into me. Immediately he orders another.

Paul makes his excuses and leaves. Even though he has survived the war so far, inside he was killed long ago.