The virtues of imprisonment

Each month John Mullan deconstructs a notable novel available in paperback. This month, Ann Patchett's Orange Prize-winning Bel Canto. Week one: confinement

Ann Patchett begins Bel Canto by sealing in her characters. In some unspecified Latin American country, insurgents have stormed the vice-president's mansion during a diplomatic party, believing that they will capture the President himself. Unfortunately for the guerrillas, he has stayed home to watch his favourite soap opera, and they are left with a miscellaneous collection of hostages from various nations. Surrounded by the unseen forces of the state, waiting for some final crisis, captors and captured while away the days that follow.

Confinement is enforced as a matter of the novel's plot, but is also a formal device. It is what enables the novelist to bring together characters in otherwise unlikely combinations and to pursue surprising relationships. A Japanese translator and a female terrorist slowly fall for each other during grammar lessons. An American diva, who was the star performer at the party, becomes involved with the opera-mad president of an electronics company who has long worshipped her from afar.

Confinement is a familiar principle of much drama. In plays, characters have to be brought together and kept on stage. All the parties and reunions we know from modern drama are ways of confining characters in each other's company. Such restriction is important to novelists too. How can a novelist segregate his or her cast from the world around so that their interactions might be plotted, their personalities known?

Patchett traps a small world of characters, almost all from different countries, speaking different languages. Most of the novel's comedy comes from the odd national differences between their experiences of a shared ordeal. Her situation is carefully contrived (and, of course, risks seeming a contrivance). Yet the principle of fiction is often some arranged restriction. "3 or 4 Families in a country Village is the very thing to work on" was Jane Austen's advice to a would-be novelist. The mock-modesty of the suggestion contains a hard truth about how her own novels work. In her country villages her characters cannot escape each other; they are forced together.

It is no accident that what is often thought to be the first novel, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, is a tale of confinement. Only hemmed in by the sea, driven back on his physical and spiritual resources, can Crusoe come to know himself, and know God's will. The two great works of the next pioneer of 18th-century fiction, Samuel Richardson, are also stories of confinement. The heroines of Pamela and Clarissa spend much of their time impris oned, scribbling the endless letters that form their narratives.

Readers will be able to think of all the ways in which great novelists have confined their characters, whether in villages or prisons, on ships or on islands (Joseph Conrad specialised in both of the last two of these). It is also an arrangement much used in popular fiction. Gothic novels began by locking their heroines in ancient buildings, setting their imaginations feverishly to work with every creak and whisper. The device became something like art in the work of Poe or in Stoker's Dracula, and is alive and well in horror fiction to this day.

Think, too, of whodunnits and thrillers. For the former, there is the country house, the cruise boat on the Nile, or - from Wilkie Collins onwards - whatever can limit and specify a collection of suspects. For the latter, there are trains and ships and planes. When I was a boy, my favourite was Alistair MacLean, who specialised in groups of desperate men cut off in Arctic outposts (Ice Station Zebra, Bear Island ) with a traitor or two among them.

Patchett's novel, however, uses the convention to deny all thrills. Some political plot is going on, but the reader is hardly allowed to know more of this than the captives. The siege is more like a weird idyll, in which time is to be filled by talking, dreaming, playing and, for a lucky few, romancing. The novel is interested in what happens to people when the once urgent-seeming plots of their lives are suspended. What then animates them? What do they actually care about? You can only find out by keeping them captive.

· John Mullan is senior lecturer in English at University College London. Have your say about Bel Canto on the Guardian talkboards at or write to The Review Book Club, Review, The Guardian, 119 Farringdon Road, London EC1R 3ER.