The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

I had this book recommended to me by several friends, and so I was looking forward to reading 'The Kite Runner', a tale of a boy growing up in Afghanistan before the overthrow of the monarchy and how his life develops through the years of the Russian invasion and exile to America. Unfortunately I was to be disappointed. The opening chapters are superb, examining the relationship between father and son, a son who feels he can never be the person his father wants him to be. It is also the tale of his relationship with his father's servant and the servant's son, both of whom are of the 'wrong' ethnicity and Islamic branch. This is handled sensitively and raises all sorts of thoughts about families and their inter-relationship. The central character, Amir, is desperate for his father's approval, and cannot understand the ease with which the servant's son, who is equally determined to serve his beloved Amir, goes through life and is good at everthing. Hassan (the son of the servant) is devoted to Amir, but is often treated with contempt by his 'master'. All this is excellent, but then it all falls apart. The writing and language becomes stilted, the characters wooden and stereotypes. The author seems to contrive to get every possible horror of the Russian invasion and the Taliban regime packed into every page. There is excessive use of cliches, the plot is just too predictable and obvious. The emotions are badly expressed, and tragedy after tragedy is piled on so that I felt as though I was being bludgeoned and ended up by suffering from emotion anaesthetic. I was numbed and frankly uninterested by the fates of all concerned. So to return to the plot, with the fall of the Afghan monarchy all lives are changed, on the day that Amir finally does something to gain, he believes, the approval of his father, something terrible happens to Hassan. It is this event that probably made me think the book wasn't going to live up to expectations - not the event but the way in which the author deals with it. It is just unbelievable, and so as the truth emerges it becomes even more unbelievable and unconvincing, and so through the exile to America (with the expulsion of the servant family before the departure of Amir and father), and the ever less convincing Afghan characters in exile. People die - but in an unconvincing way, the emotions are not well described, a courtship and marriage that has no credibility, and a 'dramatic' return to Afghanistan that is so badly described as to be annoying. A rating of 4/10 I'm sorry to say.