I finished reading this assignment a couple of weeks before Christmas and, caught up in the antics of the silly season, quickly moved onto my next (Midnight's Children if you're wondering) before posting my review. Big mistake. Big. Because it's now four-and-a-bit weeks later and I can't quite remember my initial response to Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns. But I do remember E saying, during my last visit in Sydney, "I'm not a fan of plotty books" and, now, I think I see her point.
As I see it, you’ve got plot, characters, and language. A novelist takes these three, simple ingredients and, if s/he’s an adequate cook, makes something perfectly palatable. Or, with a bit of culinary flair, s/he can take the same three items and whip up something absolutely delicious. It’s like… toast with tomato or bruschetta, you know?
All my favourite novels create something inspiring, delightful, magical with at least one, but usually two, of these elements. The language in Vladimir Nabakov's Lolita is so lyrical and incendiary that it's impossible, as a reader, not to get sucked into Humbert's doomed dream. Tim Winton's Cloudstreet takes the basic Australian stereotypes - Sam, the born loser at the racetrack, the clock-work efficient war widow, Oriel - and infuses them with such recognisable, conflicting, inner lives that we can't help but love them. And the oldest plotline of all – two people meet, fall in love, and live happily ever after – is unstitched and re-assembled so confidently in Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife that you almost forget how simple the initial premise is.
All of which is just a way of trying to identify why A Thousand Splendid Suns has faded so quickly from my mind and here’s where I got to: Hosseini, in setting out to unveil the inner lives of women “whose suffering has been matched by very few groups in recent world history”, has created a novel overwhelmingly driven by its plot but which lacks the supporting features of either great language or really engaging characters necessary to bump it up to Great Novel status.
So, the plot (and it’s not an un-interesting plot): the intertwined lives of two Afghan women – or girls, as they are at the start of their stories – during the decades of civil war, Soviet invasion, political upheaval, and Taliban control between the early-1970s and -2000s. Mariam, the illegitimate daughter of a Herat businessman, is married off to Rasheed, a widower twice her age, following her mother’s suicide. Laila is the daughter of Rasheed and Mariam’s neighbours in Kabul, who Rasheed first rescues and then marries following the destruction of her home and the death of her family during the civil war. Initially combative when Laila enters her home, Mariam slowly warms to the younger woman following the birth of Laila’s daughter, Aziza, who is, unbeknownst to Rasheed, not his child but that of Laila’s childhood friend, Tariq. I don’t want to give away too much for those who are yet to read it, but it’s probably not too major a spoiler to say that Laila’s attempts to escape the physically abusive Rasheed, find Tariq, and escape to Pakistan before the birth of her second child – taking Mariam along with her – drive the later action and, ultimately, leads to tragedy.
It's a well-constructed, if somewhat melodramatic, plot. Its foundations in actual places and historical events, about which I admittedly don’t know a great deal, give the novel real gravitas at moments, such as when medical staff turn Laila away, despite the fact that she’s in labour, because the hospital no longer treats women. The devastation caused in the bombing of Kabul is sharply drawn, as is Laila and Mariam’s fear of being arrested and beaten by the Taliban when they venture into the street unaccompanied by a man. As a story aimed at shedding light on the lives of women shrouded from common view, A Thousand Splendid Suns is perfectly readable. But without more than a plot to drive it, I can only award Two Strings.
XOXO
