Fear of Flying

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Nothing was more symbolic of the Taliban's fall than the appearance of a forbidden kite in the skies over Kabul. Breathless news accounts heralded it as a harbinger of Afghanistan's rebirth; the killjoy Talibs were gone and music, which they had also banned, played at their wake. But in Khaled Hosseini's debut novel, The Kite Runner, this symbol of liberation serves only to remind Afghan refugee Amir of a past he has desperately tried to escape. Exiled to San Francisco, Amir revisits that past in a series of flashbacks set amidst Afghanistan's war-wracked history. What begins as a rosy portrayal of an affluent childhood in 1970s Kabul quickly turns into a wretched but compelling tale of friendship, betrayal, guilt and redemption.

Strolling in Golden Gate Park, Amir watches a pair of kites overhead and recalls his childhood friend and servant, Hassan, who is a Hazara, one of Afghanistan's persecuted minorities. The boys are inseparable, but their friendship is fraught with tension. Amir is quiet, bookish and jealous of the attention his father bestows on the athletic, courageous Hassan. Angry and frustrated, he plays cruel jokes on his friend, guiltily justifying them on the basis of Hassan's low status: "Because history isn't easy to overcome. I was a Pashtun and he was a Hazara, and nothing was ever going to change that." Hosseini deftly turns Amir's struggle with race into a parable for Afghanistan. Amir's prejudices contribute to his downfall, much as the Afghans' rigid adherence to tribalism led to the country's implosion after the Soviet withdrawal.

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Amir believes he can gain his father's love by winning an annual kite-flying contest, where boys battle for supremacy armed with kite strings coated in ground glass. He longs to present his father with the last kite to fall: "I'd make a grand entrance, the prized trophy in my bloodied hands. Then the old warrior would walk up to the young one, embrace him, acknowledge his worthiness." Amir wins the battle and dispatches Hassan to capture the fallen kite. But Hassan is caught by a group of bullies who make him an offer: leave the kite or pay for it with his body. Bound by loyalty, Hassan chooses the kite. Amir stumbles upon the scene and watches mutely, too cowardly to stop them raping his best friend. "Looking back now," he muses from Golden Gate Park, "I realize I have been peeking into that deserted alley for the last 26 years."

At times, the book suffers from relentless earnestness and somewhat hackneyed descriptions. But Hosseini has a remarkable ability to imprison the reader in horrific, shatteringly immediate scenes—not least the incident in which Hassan is violated. The result is a sickening sensation of complicity. Like Amir, the reader watches the suffering and does nothing. Hosseini turns that shared guilt into a subtle condemnation of a world that watched the rape of Afghanistan—first by the Soviets, then by regional warlords and the Taliban. True evil, he suggests, comes when good people allow bad things to happen.