Bel Canto Theme of Community

Soccer games. Cooking together. Getting the whole group in one room for a concert. Sounds like a classic small town. Or what happens after a terrorist takeover, at least in Bel Canto's world. Unlikely as it seems when the terrorists invade at the beginning of the book, by the end we're reading about a community. It's a bit of a strange community, but it is one. What happens to that community when the real world intrudes on the small world inside the vice president's mansion at the end, and where are the survivors left emotionally and psychologically? Those are big question at the end of the book.

1. What things allow the formation of a community among hostages and terrorists? Is it particular events, shared discoveries about music and other things, the passage of time, all of the above, or other things?
2. Which characters already seem to have a community in the real world before the hostage crisis, and which ones don't? Does their pre-hostage community change their experience of community during their time locked up together?
3. How do the survivors interact with community when they go back to the real world? Does their experience of community change based on their experiences in the house where they've been these past months?
4. Zooming way, way out, can readers really be comfortable with the way Bel Canto constructs a community among terrorists and hostages? Sure, it's beautiful in one way, and that seems to be what the book is going for. Yet the idea of a community of terrorists and hostages could be, well, kinda creepy, too. Is Bel Canto a beautiful exploration of what makes us all human, whatever our backgrounds and choices in life? Or is it soft on the potentially disturbing idea of prisoners and captors becoming friends? What evidence in the book makes us lean one way or the other as readers?

Bel Canto is about the potential for human beings to find community through art and wonder, whatever they may have done in the past.

Because the insurrectionists in Bel Canto have idealistic goals for helping their country, and because they aren't actually willing to kill anyone, it's easier to believe they might somehow find community with everyone else in the book.