Strings and tugs for life

If the ends tie up too pat, blame the San Francisco Writers Workshop gang who handheld Khaled Hosseini through the process of his debut novel. If your eyes well up, blame it on his Asian storytelling roots and your Bollywood sensibility. But if you can't put the book down, give Hosseini the credit for bringing childhood (long after Arundhati Roy made it fashionable) back as the subject of the year.

The Kite Runner isn't a new book, but it hit India late, and is flying off bookshelves here. And it's easy to understand why. Here's an opportune work of fiction that places Afghanistan's recent history under the microscope. Though the protagonist grows up into middle age to write his (and his friend's) story, it is in the 1970s that much of the book is set. It explores familial and hierarchical relationships on a canvas sweep that extends from caste divides to the occupation, "liberation", re-occupation and "re-liberation" of one of the world's most troubled spots.

Two children nursed by the same breast grow up separated by a backyard: one privileged, the other to spend his life in service. One selfish, the other selfless. In a country where honour and men of honour command respect, Amir and Hassan are more than just playmates""just how much more one will die without knowing, and the other will find out in the most painful (maudlin?) way possible.

Amir is the child of privilege, a Pashtun, whose father's chief concern is that he seems more interested in reading and writing than in more manly pursuits. Amir cannot understand why his father dotes on his servant-friend's son Hassan. It is many years later that the story will unspool""of his father cuckolding his friend, while he too struggles with his betrayals of his childhood friend. In part, the deception is aimed at winning his father's affection, but it is also directed at ridding himself of his companion and competitor.

That thirteenth year, Amir manages both, winning the kite flying and cutting competition to blossom briefly in his father's eyes, and through an act of treachery greater even than his friend's rape, he ensures the loyal Hassan and his father Ali's exile from Kabul.

In the years that pass, Amir and his father will flee from Kabul following its Russian and, later, Taliban occupation. To the US, where the Afghan way of life endures among the refugees. Amir finds fame as a writer and marries an Afghan evacuee, creating a home, security and future.

But the past has a way of catching up, and this comes in the form of a phonecall from Peshawar. His father's friend Rahim Khan is dying. Khan, who has always known of both Amir's as well as his father's deceptions, orders him, "Come. There is a way to be whole again." His childhood companion Hassan is dead, shot in the streets by the Taliban, but there is his boy...will Amir bring him from Kabul to Peshawar?

It is in that one act of compliance that Amir becomes a hero. As he wrestles with his cowardice and the ghosts of the past, he finds himself in a ravaged Kabul, its once-pampered residents reduced to street begging""and his childhood tormentor and Hassan's rapist, who now holds his son Sohrab as a sex slave.

Amir's impossible rescue mission from the Taliban stronghold, his duel to the death, his escape to Peshawar, Islamabad and finally the US, incredibly with Hassan's son""his nephew""is also a tale of reconciliation that has its moments of poignancy. Such as when his driver, Farid, holds up a mirror of his childhood, "You probably lived in a big two- or three-story house with a nice backyard that a gardener filled with flowers and fruit trees. All gated, of course. Your father drove an American car. You had servants, probably Hazaras. Your parents hired workers to decorate the house for the fancy mehmanis they threw, so their friends would come over to drink and boast about their travels to Europe or America...". And his denouement: "You've always been a tourist here, you just didn't know it."

Amir's long-delayed act of courage, the rescue""does Amir save Sohrab, or is it the other way around?""Hassan's kite running skills, a moderate Islam and its fanatic contortion, there's plenty to keep you riveted. No wonder expectations from Hosseini's new book, also set in Afghanistan, expected next month, are soaring high.

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THE KITE RUNNER

Khaled Hosseini
Bloomsbury
Price: £3.50
Pages: 324