Soaring high

The rules of kite flying in Afghanistan are simple, Khaled Hosseini's boy narrator tells us: No rules. Fly your kite. Cut the opponents. Good luck.

This, along with sherjangi "" the game of rhymed lines and poetry we call antakshari "" are the two pastimes Amir, fledgling writer, pampered scion of a wealthy Afghan family, anxious son always aware that he doesn't measure up to his Baba, is really good at.

His father, whose character is summed up in the story about him wrestling a bear (and winning!), cannot understand his passion for stories and words, but Hassan, the young Hazara boy who is something more than a servant, something less than a friend, adores both of Amir's gifts without reservation.

Though they grew up together and were even breast-fed by the same woman, a great gulf divides the two boys: Amir is a Pashtun, a member of the ruling class, Hassan a Hazara and a Shia to boot, therefore twice an outcaste in pre-Taliban Afghan terms.

Hassan is illiterate; but he provides the first audience for the embryo writer's early stories, as well as with Amir's first taste of criticism, when Hassan in all innocence draws his friend's attention to the existence of the "plot hole".

And there are deeper rifts: Hassan's uncomplaining devotion to his friend is absolute, while Amir's affection for the boy he's spent all his life with is mired by jealousy, a sense that his father approves more of Hassan than he does of his own son.

The only time where the two can be in complete accord, their relationship untouched by guilt or envy, is when they send a kite sailing up into the sky. Amir's skill is matched by Hassan's incredible ability to know when a defeated kite is coming down to earth and where it will land, attributes that make him the best kite runner in the business.

Hosseini's The Kite Runner is billed as "the first Afghan novel in English", an attempt to render it seductively exotic that actually does this debut novel a disservice.

Hosseini evokes an Afghanistan that goes beyond the cliches of warring tribes of frontiersmen or the post-Taliban face of the country, but he doesn't stop short at postcard-views of the land his family knew so well and was forced into exile from, after the Russian invasion of the 1970s.

He also plumbs the hidden abysses of personal history; this is a tale of families and their secrets that could be universal. And the question that drives Amir's life is equally universal: is redemption possible? Can we ever really atone for the damage we inflict on the people we love?

In the aftermath of Kabul's major kite-flying tournament, Amir wrestles with the knowledge that the triumph he has always longed to present to his father, as proof of his worthiness, has been gained "" but at a desperately high cost to himself and to Hassan. Their relationship has survived cruelty, abuse and injustice, and even as it becomes apparent that it cannot survive a certain kind of silence, Afghanistan falls apart.

Childhood's end is final; it takes Amir and his father into the familiar but always intriguing territory of exile, and as they settle into the immigrant life their relationship begins to approach a kind of fragile equilibrium. It's with grace and candour that Hosseini charts the dilemma of Afghan families in the West, displaced from their homelands, holding on to the anchor of old customs as the only certainties in a shifting world.

The family Amir marries into demonstrates the strengths and weaknesses of the old order; his wife's mother is never allowed to let her singing voice soar in public, his father-in-law insists on the decorum of a time long gone, but it is also these rigidities that allow them to survive the ferment and fluctuating sensibilities of America.

It's the third section of The Kite Runner, where destiny catches up with Amir, that is the weakest in Hosseini's otherwise sensitive, evocative performance.

Amir has a chance at repairing the damage he and his family inflicted on Hassan and his father, Ali; but he must be prepared to face his own lack of courage as he goes from his relatively settled life in America back to a Kabul now reduced to rubble, unrecognisable as the city of his childhood.

"I feel like a tourist in my own country," he tells an acquaintance who's helping him out. The acquaintance sneers: Amir lived in a big house, had servants, had an American car, never knew the "real" Afghanistan at all. "You've always been a tourist here, you just didn't know it."

It's one of the few moments of genuine insight in a cliche-ridden endgame. Some of the surprises are major, but predictable, as when Hosseini reveals the story behind Hassan's connection with the family; some are relatively minor, as in the obligatory Taliban-torturing-the-masses scenes, but still predictable.

As we move towards an ending that seems, despite all Hosseini's skill and empathy, deeply contrived, it's as though someone cut the string that let The Kite Runner soar so high; unmoored, the narrative flaps around a bit until it finally plummets to a final resting place.

And Hosseini makes you, like his characters, wait until the last few pages before he offers the possibility of redemption. As Amir sends a kite soaring up into staunchly American airspace, he conjures up, poignantly, richly, the Afghanistan the news headlines never bring into print.

"The park shimmered with snow so fresh, so dazzling white, it burned my eyes...I smelled turnip qurma now. Dried mulberries. Sour oranges. Sawdust and walnuts." This is where you leave him, "a grown man running with a swarm of screaming children", and despite those stumbles, those patches of disappointment, you're glad you stayed the course.

THE KITE RUNNER

Khaled Hosseini
Bloomsbury
Price: £6.99
Pages: 324