Khaled Hosseini - The Kite Runner (2003)

 

I'm backtracking from A Thousand Splendid Suns which I read a year ago and which is honestly a masterpiece, but also from the movie adaptation of The Kite Runner. This was Hosseini's first, the one which sealed his reputation, and which I expected would be amazing. To be fair, the accolades heaped upon it have been mostly justified, and yet something isn't quite clicking. As you will possibly be aware, the tale is told against the backdrop of Afghanistan, specifically Kabul before and during the reign of the Taliban. Our focus is on the relationship of Amir, our narrator, and his friend, Hassan, towards whom he experiences an unendurable guilt parallel to the survivor's guilt which both character and author feel regarding Afghanistan and the Taliban. We also focus on Amir's ambiguous relationship with his own somewhat imperfect father, which he comes to understand better as he commits the same mistakes. As I suppose you might imagine, given the presence of authoritarian figures with firearms, much of what transpires is harrowing without ever quite being allowed to eclipse anything else the book might have to say; and it's beautifully written and communicated, particularly given how much of this is unfamiliar territory to me.

So what gives?

It's a minor detail, and possibly something I might not have noticed had I not already been so completely blown away by A Thousand Splendid Suns, but it's something in the tone, or elements of the tone of how the whole is bound together - something which, I might argue, distinguishes The Kite Runner as a debut novel. The narrative is respectfully conversational and carried with such a strong voice as to read like autobiography, which can prove deceptive because despite a wealth of autobiographical detail, it's very much a novel, arguably allegorical, and even a saga at least as much as the tale of Rostam and Sohrab from the Shahnameh, which Amir reads to Hassan at one point; and because it's a saga, it makes use of happenstance and repetition, thus Assef who terrorises the boys in their youth, turns up as the sociopath directing the public executions when Amir returns to Kabul as an adult - and in spite of the visceral realism of the telling, it feels a little like Darth Vader revealed as Luke's dad. So it's not so much the bricks of the novel as the mortar, the conspicuously tidy connections, segues, and patterns which somehow undermine the otherwise powerful realism. It isn't a huge problem, because The Kite Runner is nevertheless a tremendous and sobering read, but it feels like a first novel and there was better to come.