OCTOBER READING: AND THE MOUNTAINS ECHOED by Khaled Hosseini

OCTOBER READING: AND THE MOUNTAINS ECHOED by Khaled Hosseini

Best known for his first novel,  'The Kite Runner', this author certainly has, in spades, the wonderful gift of telling a story. A very powerful book that when published in 2003 introduced most of us, in a post 9/11 world, to Afghanistan, its people and cultures, and its recent conflicts. Since then two more books have been written by this author, of which this is one. There are many similarities with 'The Kite Runner' - after all why change a winning formula. All three books span at least one generation, Kabul is a major setting, the Taliban feature, the oppression of women, the divisions that exist between the rich and the poor, the weak and the powerful. And yet, for me, neither of the these later two books capture the brilliance, the richness, the raw emotion, the power of that first novel. There is no doubt they are terrific stories, with great characters, suspense, unexpected twists and surprises, but something is missing. I felt vaguely dissatisfied after reading 'A Thousand Splendid Suns' a few years ago, and it was the same with this book. 

Covering 60 years or so from 1952 to the present day, this is the story of family loyalty and love, beginning with an impoverished father coming to the inevitable conclusion that 'A finger had to be cut, to save the hand'. Abdullah and his younger sister, Pari, are the main focus of the early stages of the story, and then it moves to other characters whose lives are also affected by this decision. Staying mainly in Afghanistan, the story also goes to Paris, Greece, and San Francisco, as the years pass. 

There are a lot of minor characters who make a big impression at the time, that you think are going to be important to the overall story, but then just as suddenly  they disappear.  I spent a lot of time wondering what had happened to them, why they were even in the story in the first place, and will they appear some time before the end, to which the answer was no. I would love to have known what eventually happened to the young girl with the badly smashed face, or the two brothers who in one chapter were young boys living in a street in Kabul, then a chapter or two later were fully grown men living in San Francisco - how did that happen! Or a whole section of 40 odd pages back in rural Afghanistan, the central character a young boy, son of the local drug lord, who meets a homeless boy. You can see this could go somewhere, and just when it is getting interesting, whoosh, we are on some other tangent - a Greek Island in 1967. 

But despite the disjointedness, and the hopping around the decades, it is a great story, and very readable. From the very beginning, it is easy to care about the characters, to understand the motives behind the way they behave and to be happy with the eventual outcome. I did really enjoy it, my reservation being that maybe nothing this author writes will be as good as 'The Kite Runner'.