I finally got around to finishing The Kite Runner, one of the more popular novels of the past decade. Ultimately, while I certainly would not deny that it has strengths, I was also dissatisfied, for I felt it fell short of expectations, both those established by the press and word-of-mouth and those I formed myself as I read, and I feel that while it was a good little diversion, it is by no means a literary novel.
The story works well: a privileged young boy grows up in Afghanistan, best friends with the servant boy whose loyalty and devotion are unconditional; no matter how far young Amir pushes him, Hassan will always put others first and it tends to be Amir who ends up feeling guilty, contrasting his own nature with one so selfless, and worrying that his father compares the two boys and he fares badly, reflected in such pure light. One day when they are flying kites, Amir witnesses something terrible, and his guilt at doing nothing to stop it shapes the rest of his life. Finally, as an adult, he is given the chance to return to the country he was forced to flee when the Taliban seized power to find redemption.
There are moments of real excellence here: what Amir witnesses won’t be foreseen by many, and comes as quite a shock, and the way little Amir reacts with simple cowardice and turns his guilt into spite is extremely well-crafted, at once reprehensible and entirely understandable. The final chapter is also great, avoiding predictability and cliché. The middle act, Amir’s life in America, which I imagine was where a lot of people got bored and stopped reading, had some well-observed vignettes about relationships between father and son and about young love, and was the most mature part of the novel. The trouble was the lack of consistency: this part felt like it belonged in something more sophisticated.
The trouble is that we get too much that, in all frankness, is hopelessly cheesy. The book is portrayed as a hard-hitting, literary take on life for Afghans and a stunning coming-of-age story. Okay, I could swallow the way Kabul under the Taliban was portrayed, the suffering of the people, the brutality of public executions and the desperation of people who are only trying to be charitable. But when we have long blonde hair coming tumbling out of a turban during a dramatic fistfight with lives on the line, old faces from a childhood just happening to show up at the right times and last-minute rescues by little slingshot aces…it just doesn’t belong with the rest. There’s too much of the soap opera here, the suicide attempts and the standing up to drunken soldiers and managing to overcome them, and runaways and preternatural kite-running powers – it drags the whole thing down, sad to say.
And the style doesn’t sit well with me. Some of the blurb claims Hosseini’s to be a very original voice, but that’s far from my impression. His style smacks of writing groups, of safe options and stylistic flourishes that are drawn right out of pulp, like repetitions of things like ‘I fade out’ at the end of passages when the narrator dips in and out of consciousness, or omissions of expected punctuation. It’s very light fare, more page-turner than classic, which is fine except that he occasionally reaches for something more impressive and doesn’t quite get there, and his subject would have suited a more sophisticated style, especially when he introduces his less believable plot elements.
In addition, there’s an unpleasant taste in the mouth, thinking about why this is so popular. It fits so well into political agendas in America that it makes me uncomfortable. It assuages white liberal guilt about the Middle East by making people feel they now know what is occurring in one part of it, while at the same time conforming with occidental ideologies, allowing the West to pat its own back for opposing those nasty fundamentalist child-molesters and murderers. It’s the same problem as with Reading Lolita in Tehran: you know the writer is being honest and the sentiments are genuine, but with such a neat packaging of a very complex problem that aligns so neatly with the idea that Western democracies are havens to all while the Islam brings with it terror and death, I can’t help but fear that this only convinces readers to stay insulated in their little left-leaning world while never having to challenge any of their preconceptions, indeed having prejudices confirms. Amir’s views on religion change considerably, but always they are shallow, obvious, unconvincing. Truthfully, I feel manipulated.
Worth reading and I will also try A Thousand Splendid Suns, but I cannot recommend this highly.
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