The author of The Kite Runner returns with another dark tale of the turmoil and destruction in Afghanistan in the thirty years to the early 2000s. In this one, there is even more graphic cruelty, misogyny, and domestic violence (to the point of murder) than in his former story. The pervasive hypocrisy of male Muslim sexual morality (that seems like an oxymoron) is exposed with men allowed to marry and rape children, deny paternity and banish their illegitimate offspring while women cannot even show their faces in public.
The story loosely traces the life of one such banished girl as only one of many threads, as she is married off against her will, abused, and then executed by the Taliban for killing her cruel husband as he is attempting to kill a younger rival wife in their Kabul home. That younger wife with an illegitimate son of her own, descends into sentimental nostalgia as she seeks to find some meaning in her life of deprivations and fear in the last few chapters. I won’t give away more of the complex dark plot, but none of the characters are saints, and everyone recites the Koran and observes their prayer routines as they go about killing each other. They pay lip service to the seventh commandment while ignoring all the others, not unlike many other religions which tend to equate morality with sexual restraint while killing, coveting and stealing with abandon. But Muslims here take this one step further, applying the prohibitions surrounding sex only to women. No one escapes from the author’s scathing mockery, except the originators and propagators of different branches of the Islamic faith who should bear a lot of blame for the unchecked violence.
The lunacy of Taliban orthodoxy is beautifully displayed by one episode where they demanded that an artist modify his painting of flamingos because their legs were inappropriately exposed.
The geography and the local culture of Afghanistan are well described and the liberal sprinkling of Urdu and Pasto words provide local colour while it does not interfere much with the understanding of the story.
This is an extremely bleak, depressing, but enlightening story that I did not enjoy nearly as much as The Kite Runner.
The Passionate Reader 