And the Mountains Echoed - Khaled Hosseini including rather surprisingly Maeve Binchy and Victoria Hislop!

Well I finished the book which at one point seemed unlikely. I was surprised when I was informed we were reviewing this book. We have already reviewed A Thousand Splendid Suns and from memory I believed most of the group had also read The Kite Runner which meant a full house for Hosseinis novels. Let me start by saying I absolutely loved Kite Runner (I cried) and I very much liked Splendid Suns so I approached with this with slight intrepidation as surely the high standards of Runner and Splendid could not be equalled a third time. (They will be called Kite and Sun next so keep up) Initially it appeared as though it was going to be identical to the other two books – a poverty stricken family in Afghanistan, with two children as the main characters where something heart breaking happens to them early on. Sound familiar? I must admit I was a little disappointed at this stage. I had read and loved two versions of Afghanistan heart break, I didn’t want to read another. How wrong was I though! After believing we would spend the rest of the book following Abdullah and Pari and their no doubt tales of woe (would he accidently kill her? Would he be sucked in to the war and tragically killed before being reunited with her? (you get the picture)) the two vanished from our pages never to be seen again. Well not for pages and pages and pages anyway. The book became a collection of intertwined short stories, skipping backwards and forwards in time and continents. I’m not a fan of short stories. My main exposure to them has been Maeve Binchy (RIP) but whereas Binchy had the sense to call her books a collection of short stories and set each one in a separate Chapter Hosseini tried to paint his as one story leaving the reader confused, and frustrated. Binchy effortlessly intertwines her characters, you know instantly who is who. Hosseini needed 3 or 4 pages for you to catch up which you don’t want to be doing every third chapter or so. It is such a shame as once you are up to speed with who is who you fall for the characters, you fight for them as Hosseini really is such a wonderful story teller and character builder. There were just large portions of the book though that you felt were page fillers (the Doctors mother over in Greece with Thalia for example?). Although they were lovely to read, once you had stepped back you found yourself saying why did he put that in? How do they push the plot along? I found myself during the meeting comparing the book to Victoria Hislops, either The Return or The Island as they were similar, dip in and out with various characters over a number of years. However with her books there was a definite sense of purpose driving the plot forward with a reduced number of characters. I think with Hosseini we were two thirds of the way through and still meeting new characters. I kind of got that with each short story he wanted to deliver a particular message, there just didn’t seem to be an overall one. I particularly related to the cousin who was a Doctor who met the girl over in Afghanistan and came home wanting to heal her. Although obviously I have never been in that position I have come home from holidays feeling I didn’t fit in and wanted something different only for the effect to wear off after a few weeks of being home. We all loved the Jin story right at the beginning of the book – I could have had a whole book on that. There was also one beautiful quote from Pari towards the end of the book where she described her adoptive mother as giving Pari a spade with which she was expected to fill up the endless holes her mother had (sorry paraphrasing).I could go on as there are lots of individual examples of Hosseini showing how good a writer he is, again it just didn’t, for me, come together. One member of the group believed the book did have an overall theme - to explain how much of a global effect the Afghanistan troubles had. How natives scattered and rebuilt their lives all over the world. However I’m not sure about this as a message as a lot of the Characters we followed didn’t leave because of Afghanistan’s troubles (indeed Nabi and Pari’s adopted father stayed until they died) and I’m not sure it went into enough depth to have this as the message. I also questioned whether the book was trying to say everyone is bad in some way. The new leader of Shagbad who was doing lots of good had previously stolen everyones land, Nabi arranged the adoption of Pari so he could seduce her adoptive mother, even the Doctor who moved over to Afghanistan to help was a rubbish son to his mother. So many of the characters didn’t go on to better things – one of the Cousins was a gangster, Pari’s adopted mother was a drunk. Abdullah in the end suffered from some sort of dementia. If Hosseini was trying to paint everyone in a bad light – why? We did keep coming back to talk about the book during the meeting which is unusual for us (sometimes we struggle to come up with anything to say other than who is going on holiday where) and I love books that give so much discussion. We didn’t think Hosseini had another book in him about Afghanistan. Sorry that is a very abrupt statement and if you do have another one in the pipeline Hosseini please don’t throw it in the bin on our account! It would be interesting to see though what direction his next book (and I am sure there will be one) will take. I think we all agreed that the feather was a bit of a let-down in the end. I wasn’t disappointed that Abdullah didn’t remember Pari and they didn’t get their happy ending (in fact I quite liked it as life isn’t always like that and it linked back to the jinn story where the father forgot) but I think Hosseini wanted to give the reader something and really a token that Pari didn’t even remember fell a bit short. A couple of us in the book club really really loved the book giving it a 9 and I can understand why as he really is a brilliant story teller and paints such lovely characters. However I think this one missed the mark. I was left disappointed that it wasn’t a heart breaker (hypocrite I know) and that there wasn’t more of an overall story. If we in our group totally missed the point and you are screaming your way through this blog shouting ‘ITS OBVIOUS WHAT THE STORY WAS’ then please comment. I would love to hear your perspective and in some ways would like to be proved wrong. The book ended up with a 7 (or was it a 7.5?). With the exception of about two of our members I think we would all say do read Hosseini. Two of the best books I’ve read in a long time are by him, just not this one. Next one The Affair by Gill Paul.