Magical Realism, Kind Of
It's hard to pin this one down. While Patchett may describe her work as "fairy tale," the narrative style works not quite like that. But it's not really a realistic novel about everyday life either. Patchett's style is often described as a kind of magical realism, and that may be the closest we're going to get.
Take a look at Shmoop's list of top ten magical realism must-knows if you don't believe us. Bel Canto hits lots of the items on the list. The Fantastic? Terrorists doing what an opera singer tells them and hostages discovering a happy community paradise when they're stuck as prisoners sure bends the rules of reality.
The Mundane? Yep, Bel Canto is full of everyday life too, even if it's everyday life when you're a diplomat or an opera singer who's been kidnapped: waiting, cooking, practicing your scales. You know, all very normal stuff.
Seriously weird stuff with time? Check. Bel Canto is full of sections about time stopping, going wacky, or not doing what we expect as everyone is stuck in a place far away from their normal lives.
Incorporation of myths? It may not look like it at first, but Bel Canto is full of opera, and opera is full of myth. So that's there too.
But it's important to remember that Patchett's doing something a little different than your typical magical realist, too.
So back to the fantastic: well, it's not that fantastic. All the elements that can be seen as fantasy-like in Bel Canto tell us something unexpected about humanity, but they're not, like, different from the laws of physical reality as we think we know them. Nothing in Bel Canto seems physically improbable. Nobody turns into a bug or suddenly sprouts wings and flies away. What's surprising is that the people in Bel Canto behave in ways they wouldn't ordinarily.
Matter-of-fact narrative style? Nope. Patchett is nothing if not poetic in her style. It's almost like she's trying to sing opera to us as she writes. Political critique? Sure, this is apparently a book about a hostage situation where the rebels are pushing for societal change, but the plot cares a lot more about the relationships that spring up than the (lack of) political change in the country.
So in a way, this book is almost the inverse of most magical realism: its fantasy elements are found in the poetic writing style and the imagining of what its characters could become in an unlikely situation, not in magicked-up events. It's not so much using fantastic elements to create a political critique as it's using an apparently political situation to explore the fantastic realm of human exploration and wonder. So much for picking a genre.