★★★★☆
Four Stars
“Creating means vandalizing the lives of other people, turning them into unwilling and unwitting participants. You steal their desires, their dreams, pocket their flaws, their suffering. You take what does not belong to you. You do this knowingly.”
Afghanistan has been brutally scarred by the violence of its recent past; the pain of decades of conflict lies at the heart of Khaled Hosseini‘s novels. It is an indelible feature of a country’s history, the country of Hosseini’s birth; and yet one wonders how cynically the author recognises the currency of suffering in writing. The quotation is from the mouth of Nila Wahdati, poetess and protagonist in the latest work, but is also one of Hosseini’s many reflections on his own creation.
Abuse, domestic and martial, dominates his first two books (The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns). And the Mountains Echoed, returning to the Kabul of the last sixty years, is another study in human cruelty – this time accompanied by a catalogue of horrific accidents. Yet Hosseini also hunts for suffering beyond his usual domain: this is not just fear in a handful of dust, but arthritis in Paris, dog attacks in Athens, Alzheimer’s in New York.
Hosseini has been compared to Dickens; and like his literary forefather, he understands only too well the “attraction of repulsion”, our macabre fascination with woe that draws our noses only closer to the page. The Dickens comparison is not wholly damning: for adversity is also used to show the enduring benevolence of the human condition, and to deepen our empathy.
Guilt is an equally important theme. Amir’s shame drove The Kite Runner: reluctant to drop a winning formula, And the Mountains Echoed has nine protagonists, nine parts, nine betrayals. Each is connected to the misfortunes of a family living in rural 1940s Afghanistan; each must remorsefully come to terms with the wrongs of the past. Hosseini deftly condenses sin, reducing it to a simple impulse: The Kite Runner memorably describes all evil as theft, where And the Mountains Echoed explores the ways that humans turn their backs on family, friends, and countries.
Just as we feel Hosseini in each of his characters – many share biographical similarities, most a startling honesty that endears them to us – we also detect his own guilt. Certain protagonists are troubled by their dislocation from Afghanistan (notably a doctor who, like Hosseini, emigrated to California as a child), and we find this problem even in the mechanics of his prose: ethnic words are quietly translated (“the qarias, the small villages”), and Hosseini’s American idiom sits uncomfortably in the mouth of a 1960s Afghan butler (“she had promised to write me”).
Though there are minor flaws in technique (obvious symbols, like the Forrest Gump feather, are clumsy), Hosseini often writes beautifully. The landscape is wonderfully alive – “fat rain fell from the sky, and the village rose thirstily to meet it” could be straight out of D. H. Lawrence. The scope of his book, around the globe in sixty years in all manner of narrative voices, is enjoyably ambitious if at times striving too hard to impress. His characters all have bits that are the same – but maybe that is his point, anyway.
And the Mountains Echoed is published by Bloomsbury. It is available to purchase for £16.99 here.
