the kite runner

I hate to admit it, but I cried big soggy tears during the film The Kite Runner last night. But I couldn't help but feel I was being carefully guided towards that very response, as the film wended its way without nuance towards each contrived climax. I recall having the same sense when I read the book several years back. Khaled Hosseini's new novel was on everyone's must-read list for a while, so I picked it up on one of my many visits to our local library. While I appreciated the story in a general way, I felt that it was severely marred by all those contrivances and tricks that mark the books of many first-time novelists: too many neat tie-ups, too much coincidence, a loathsome and unfleshed main character, and an ending that blushed with false emotion. In short, it was the very stuff of which Hollywood schlock is made.

The story centers around Amir, a wealthy child of privilege in the Afghanistan of the 1970s. Amir's sole playmate, Hassan, is a Hazara child (Afghanistan's indiginous race) and the son of his father's household servant. Amir and Hassan are inseparable, until Amir witnesses a horrific act of violence committed against Hassan but does nothing to assist his downtrodden and persecuted friend. Swallowed up by the shame of his cowardice, he turns his back on Hassan and Hassan and his father are eventually dismissed from service in his family's home. Years pass, the Russians invade and Amir and his father escape through Pakistan to America where they establish new lives for themselves, Amir completes college, finds a bride, and embarks upon a successful literary career. One day, out of the blue, Amir receives an urgent phone call from an old friend of his father who is living in Pakistan. He urges him to return to the country of his youth in order "to be good again." Amir leaves at once for Pakistan, from which he embarks upon a hazardous mission into Kabal to rescue the son of the now deceased Hassan (who, as it turns out, is his brother).

Obviously, with such a conclusion, the story was rich with redemptive potential -redemption that rarely comes to most in the real and waking life. Amir is given the chance to redeem all his past wrongs (the tale even mirrors specific events so precisely and you get the feeling that Amir is working some sort of magical charm to erase all his youthful misdeeds). Through his goodness to Hassan's son, Amir achieves complete redress for the hateful manner in which he treated Hassan. One is left assuming that he now gets to live happily ever after without regret.

But we do not live happily ever after. We have regrets. They linger and they eat us up inside from time to time. Sometimes, in the dark of night, we think on the wrongs of our past - we watch the scenes in which we stumbled, in which we acted with cowardice, or with greed. And the scenes pass before our mind's eye in slow motion, and as we watch, we cringe at the reflection of our bad behavior, we reconsider, moments and years too late, how we might have acted. But we don't get a second chance -we live with what we did with the first chance, and if we regret, we regret forever.

In all likelihood, Amir of The Kite Runner was indeed left with regret, despite his heroic redemption. He did not cry a bucket of tears and then walk away refreshed and unharmed, as we did as mere viewers of a film. But I wish the film had showed this. I wish we had some glimmer of his lingering remorse, a sense that he would always suffer in some small way from the remembrance of his cruelty. Instead, we got the neat tie-up, the redemption, the Hollywood ending.