A thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

Enjoyable and enlightening, but ...
I had read and enjoyed Hosseini's first novel, "The Kite Runner" and was really looking forward to reading this. You can see immediately the similarities with the previous book in the setting, Afghanistan, and style - teaching the reader about Afghan life and troubles through very personal and powerful stories of individuals.

But the are are many differences too. The main characters this time are two women and the historical period is longer, from the 1970s to 2003. So, we learn about Afghan life under the tribal wars, fighting the Russians, the arrival and dominance of the Taliban, and much later the arrival of the Americans and their allies.

The characters are strongly, if not always fully, drawn and we are made very much to empathise with Mariam at first as she is taken to be the wife of a much older man, Rasheed, who turns out to be very cruel, and later Laila, the second, younger and more passive heroine, who is tricked into marrying the same tyrant. The relationship between the two women grows and their suffering and tribulations are described in great detail, so we are drawn into their lives very much.

My response to the book changed as I read it. At first I was thinking I was was reading a book for teenagers as first Mariam and later Laila were young and we were led to empathise with them. This changed, however, as they aged, and the violence increased. Later I felt the characters were too simply drawn: both heroines were too good and Rasheed too evil - I wanted to know what made him like that. In fact most characters were black or white. Mariam's father was the one exception [could we have a spin-off about him?] - a weak man who could not make a stand for his principles and loves.

The ending was the biggest disappointment. Not what happened to Mariam [I won't give that away] but the return of another character was just too neat, too pat a way to end the story. It just convinced me of one feeling I had frequently during the reading, that I was being manipulated a little too obviously into feeling specific things about specific people and events. The epilogue was the final straw, pointing you to a website where you can make contributions to work done in Afghanistan. Was the whole story leading to that?

I feel Hosseini is an excellent story-teller but not a great novelist. He knows exactly how to spin a yarn and pull in the reader to that world and the people in it. He has done excellent service to his country [although, unlike Laila, he does not seem to want to return there from California] in using his narrative skills to point us to their situation. When he starts to write about other places and other issues, then it will be interesting to see if has the same popular appeal. Meanwhile, "A Thousand Splendid Suns" has cemented his growing reputation and good luck to him.