Hosseini's shamelessly enjoyable tale of separated siblings draws on the tradition of the American airport novel – and is none the worse for it
The US novelist Khaled Hosseini has made a career writing about the recent history of his native Afghanistan. This is his third novel, after the bestselling The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns. Afghanistan has almost no novel-writing tradition; though novels in Persian have appeared since the beginning of the 20th century, they were written and published in Iran. If there are novelists in Pashto, the other Afghan language, I haven't been able to discover it. The novelist who wants to address Afghanistan is going to have to turn elsewhere for inspiration, and Hosseini's work rests entirely on the distinguished and often enjoyable tradition of the American airport bestseller. "Human behaviour is messy and unpredictable and unconcerned with convenient symmetries," Hosseini writes, a neat conclusion of a sentence that could, time-savingly, have been written by Harold Robbins.
The novel begins with the separation of two siblings in rural Afghanistan in the early 1950s. Abdullah loves his little sister, Pari, beyond anything; he will walk miles over rocks to get her what she pines for, a peacock feather. Their mother is dead; their father, Saboor, married a second time to a local girl, Parwani. Her brother, chauffeur to a wealthy Kabuli, Suleiman Wahdati, arrives in his employer's car with his employer's wife, Nila, a beautiful young woman in a glamorous sleeveless dress. They cannot have children. A solution presents itself, and Pari is carried off.
Pari grows up in the Wahdati family, first in Kabul and then in Paris. Abdullah never ceases to miss Pari, though we only start to hear about his life when he moves to America. Suleiman remains in the Wahdati house, which is cared for by Nabi, the chauffeur whom he chastely loves. Unusually for the time and place, Suleiman doesn't offer Nabi 10 quid and a packet of cigarettes to drop his pants. ("I knew when I met you that we weren't the same, you and I, that it was an impossible thing that I wanted …") The house endures civil war, the Taliban era and the post-2001 period of NGO supremacy, though, interestingly, the novel doesn't mention the Soviet occupation of the 1980s.
Will Pari and Abdullah ever meet again? She is in France with her own family and her own tragedies; Abdullah is in California, running a restaurant for wealthy Afghan expats. They do not know of each other's existence, and time is running out for both of them. Will they be reunited? You bet your sweet bippy.
This is a shamelessly enjoyable book. Its ironies and tragic reversals will surely be made into a big movie, but actually it would make an irresistible musical – it is basically Blood Brothers with better food and clothes. Enjoyable as it is, though – and it's definitely a step up from Dan Brown – it is restricted by the requirements of its genre, in particular the need for psychological situations to play out in simply satisfying or O Henry irony-of-fate ways. Any kind of complexity or irresolution is beyond it. The children love each other not only without condition, but every day, without a break, exhaustingly, from dawn to dusk. A returning Timur "has behaved like the quintessential ugly Afghan-American"; there's a reason for that, the cynical reader thinks, and it's that all Hosseini's characters have a usefully quintessential side.
Like every example of the genre, the novel safely places anything at all confusing in italics – it used to be style indirect libre, then reported thoughts, and now, apparently, it's dialogue when it occurs in the past. And like almost every example of the genre, the novel only observes a character making a gesture when the gesture has a specific meaning – characters sigh, or shrug, or grin, sometimes two or three times on a page. When Hosseini ventures outside this safe territory, the result is not convincing. The wealthy Mrs Wahdati is seen "hugging her purse the way a pregnant woman might hold her swollen belly". Do pregnant women hug or hold their belly? Could you compare such a hold to a handbag-holding grip? It might seem trivial, but it is characteristic of the airport novel's aim to suppress the complexity and variety of human motivation in favour of neat story-serving points. Mrs Wahdati ought to feel about her possessions the feelings that a pregnant woman has for her baby; there is a useful sort of lesson that she will learn further down the track. They both ought to be observed hugging their treasures.
Still, I enjoyed this novel in a very undemanding sort of way. The shifts of viewpoint would be ambitious if the novel had any interest in varieties of psychology. But it serves its purpose in providing amusement for two and a half hours; a day after finishing it, I had forgotten everything about it. "Please tell her, tell her," Nabi writes at one point, "that I cannot know the myriad consequences of what I set into motion." He'd obviously never read an American airport novel, or he'd have a pretty good idea.
Philip Hensher's Scenes from Early Life is published by Fourth Estate.
via Books: Fiction | guardian.co.uk
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