Book Review: The Kite Runner

(By Khaled Hosseini)

Amir is a young lad growing up in Afghanistan in the seventies with his best friend, Hassan, who is also his low caste servant. On the day of the local kite competition Amir, desperate to win his father’s approval, wins and Hassan loyally chases down, or runs, the last kite cut, only to run foul of the local teenaged, Hitler-loving bully, Assef. What follows is witnessed by Amir, but he lacks the courage to stop it.

This incident sours Amir’s relationship with Hassan and it’s just after this point that he has to flee to America with his father due to the Russian invasion. The story kicks around reasonably well from here for a while, as we see Amir grow, fall in love and get married. In 2001, he receives a call beckoning him back to Afghanistan to finally seek redemption for the guilt he feels over the kite running incident of 1975.

The story to this point is poignant and touching, but then Mr Hosseini tugs a little hard at the heart strings and his story descends into daytime telemovie cliché like an out of control kite. The first comes early in the third act and is hinted at pretty strongly by the set up in the second act, which also sets up cliché #2. Things, naturally, don’t go smoothly for Amir once he’s back in Kabul (#3 & #4), leading to a run-in with Assef, now relishing life in the Taliban (#5 &#6). The climax of this little incident (#7)is as hackneyed as you could possibly hope for and would actually be funny if you weren’t so disappointed.

As the third act draws to a close the reader might be wondering why there are so many pages to go, and the unwelcome appearance of a hurriedly written fourth act is the answer. This is possibly worse than the last few chapters, as cliché #2 is finally expressed fully for those too thick not to have gotten it yet, and then a complicating factor is thrown in which is pointless, unrealistic and just badly handled from start to finish. The last page and a half gives a final tug at the heart strings as we witness Amir, finally free of guilt for 1975 (but devoid of guilt for 2001) running a kite for Hassan’s son.

This is a shame as Mr Hosseini writes superbly at the beginning of the book, actually causing me to wonder for a while whether it was autobiographical. If he can overcome the Matthew Reilly clichés, he could be a top class author.