The book is set in 1970s Afghanistan, where we meet 12 year old Amir who lives with his rich father and leads a priviledged life, and his best friend Hassan who is the son of Amir's fathers servant. Hassan and his father are Hazara, and considered to be nothing more then good servants. Amir goes to school and learns to read and write, whereas Hassan stays at home and does menial jobs, Amir often mocks Hassan because he is illiterate. But both boys enjoy the past time of flying kites, and with Hassan being a great kite runner, Amir plans to win back the love of his father by winning the local kite-fighting tournament. But things go wrong and Hassan is hurt by a twisted boy named Hermann who is half german/half afghan and has a sick mind. After Amir flees from the scene leaving Hassan in Hermanns clutches, he realises things can never be the same again between him and his loyal friend. Years later when Amir is married and living in America, he is stil haunted by what happened to Hassan. And when given the chance to go back to a Taliban ruled Afghanistan to make things right, Amir knows he has to.

When i first picked up this book, it was purely because i hadn't seen the movie. And there were times i wished i hadn't picked up the book at all, because it's full of trauma and its upsetting. But it's also about friendship and loyalty, and trying to make things right. What happens to Hassan is hard to read, and Amirs cowardice is frustrating, but the book is powerful and the friendship between the two boys as they grow up is described in a great way. And the ending of the book is almost how you "need" it to be. Although i probably wont ever see the film, and the book is sometimes hard to read. I liked the way it was written.

I must be getting old....(actually, an incontestable truth).

But, damn, I was sure I had already written a review of this book, however it is nowhere to be seen. Maybe I wrote it and never submitted it. Maybe my memory is just crap.

So, here goes... though I have to say at the outset that it is a while since I read it and so I don't recall the names of the all the protagonists.

At the beginning of the book, we are in Afghanistan when it was still a kingdom, (which places it in around the early 1970's)... before it became the tragic, war-torn country that we see almost daily on the news.....before the Russians tried to invade, and were repelled heroically by brave tribesmen supplied with munitions from the United States. (One wonders if any of those same "freedom fighters" are now known as the Taliban).

The narrator is a small boy, Amir, the son of rich man who lives like a feudal lord, with servants and retainers who touch their forelocks to him. The father is not just rich, he is physically large, a fighting man admired and respected by all his friends for those qualities; a man not to be challenged.

Amir has a friend, Hassan, who is the son of one of the retainers. Hassan belongs to an ethnic group called the Hazara, a tribe who are treated with contempt by other afghani clans, and regarded as suspicious..... rather like the attitude of British people towards Romany folk, but famed also for the beauty of their women. Amir, on the other hand, is a Pashtun. Readers of National Geographic magazine may recall a photograph of a young green-eyed Afghani girl who's captivating expression bewitched the world some 20 years ago from the front cover of that journal. I believe she was Hazara.

Due to the differences in social standing between the boys, Amir, the rich and privileged one, goes to school, while little Hassan stays home doing the menial tasks assigned to him as a servant boy. As a result, Hassan remains illiterate....and Amir mocks him for his ignorance. Hassan is portrayed as a noble, loyal little boy..... he is also the kite runner of the title.

At that time in Afghanistan, as in other countries, small boys indulged in the practice of kite-flying as a form of combat. It is a rather civilized type of contest, where one party gets defeated, but no one gets hurt (at least that is the theory). I happen to know a little about this, not from having lived in Afghanistan, but in Mexico. There small boys fly home-made kites of split bamboo, cotton thread and coloured tissue paper, which are called "papolotes", an old Nahuatl word...which suggests that the practice dates from before the Conquest. My youngest son was quite adept at making, and flying papalotes when he was younger; a very wholesome pastime, I always thought. The sport involves tying razor blades to the string just below the kite (or alternatively, shards of broken glass are glued to the line), and then once the kite is airborne, trying to engage an enemy kite and cut its string. This causes the defeated kite to plummet to the ground, its tail trailing behind it.

At the opening of the Kite Runner, we meet Hassan, the little servant boy and expert kite dude and his social "superior", Amir. It is a lyrical beginning, portraying the innocence of youth, the peaceful sun-blessed days with blue skies, when small boys sit in a pear tree, surrounded by its blossoms, and discuss their possibilities of winning the next kite flying contest.

I had great hopes that the story would continue to enchant me like those first few pages did, but I was disappointed. I would say that it went down-hill progressively from the opening pages.

We are also introduced to the bad guy, a kid who is half German and half Afghani, by the name of Hermann (I am not sure that this is really his name, but it will do for my purpose).

Political strife comes quickly to upset the old order, there is a revolution, the king is deposed, shortly after that the invasion by Russia begins... the victims, as ever, are the civilians caught between the warring factions. Violence becomes a way of life, and the Taliban appear.

And who do you think grows up to be the meanest Taliban of the lot....? Hermann, of course. And just to make sure that you really don't identify with him, Hermann is guilty of the following faults, a) he is a paedophile... he likes small boys b) he is a sadist, and takes great pleasure in torturing his victims, c) he is a heroin addict d) finally he is the worst sort of hypocritical, bigoted, intolerant, religious fundamentalist.

So, a really good question is, why is this particular book being hailed across America as a terrific read? Could it be that it is because it is saying exactly what the American public want to believe?

In the same way that the crushingly boring books of the late Alex Solzhenitzin were acclaimed and he got the Nobel (for one of those dreadful, depressing tomes like Cancer Ward, or the Gulag Archipelago) because at the time, the cold war was on and this was what the West wanted.... an authoritative account to reassure them that communism was really as nasty and evil as they had thought. (A belief which made storming into Vietnam seem "justifiable".)

Now, from what we are able to glean from the news....which of course will be slanted by the people in power.... the Taliban are indeed responsible for some dreadful crimes and oppression.... (particularly towards the unfortunate Hazara people). However, this caricature of evil, in the person of Hermann, seems to be intended as a symbol for us to seethe against and hate.... as a literary device, it seems too blatant, too extreme, and unlikely to be typical.

Towards the end, the story degenerates even further. Amir and his father being wealthy, escape to America... there Amir courts an Afghani girl as though they were still in Afghanistan.... by asking her father for her hand. And gets married. Frankly, it just reads like mundane autobiographical stuff... of interest only to the people concerned.

Later, motivated primarily by the guilt he feels about the way he treated his little buddy, Hassan, who is now dead, Amir has to go back to Afghanistan to rescue Hassan's son.... a child traumatized by ill-treatment at the hands of Hermann, and bring him to live happily every after???? in the land of the free. Oh dear.

My advice... forget it. It is propaganda disguised as literature.

Post Script. I wonder if this review is too judgmental, too damning. Maybe too arrogant? Is there something I am missing here? Should I be listening to Mr Hosseini more sympathetically? I am aware that a lot of people are reading this book and seem to think it is great ... please share your impressions by adding your comments. Thanks.

"I want to see you now. I want you to come to me."

We Are Now Beginning Our Descent is a well crafted and constructed novel that gets inside the head of Adam Kellas as he is lead by an e-mail and a small memory of Astrid, a former girlfriend, that has "crossed into him."

James Meek paints the love story between Kellas & Astrid against the backdrop of Afghanistan, London and America. Similar in places to the style of George Orwell, James blurs the political into the human story to show floundering love and war, mixed up and acting upon each other.

He does this by cleverly showing us the modern vantage point of war, where F-18 pilots fly over Afghanistan and as they release their bombs, "perceive the human grain making up the fabric of the view," but never land - only reaching out and touching with destruction.

He then forces Kellas to crash land from his orbit as a war reporter in Afghanistan and to reach out and touch Astrid's life. Kellas has built up memories of her that he has fallen in love with and as he is eventually forced to fit the real woman into the fragments of her that live within him.

"You have to make your own lover before you can know her ... But you've got to leave space for the real woman to grow inside."

We then watch to see if his touch is destructive or one of love.

On his way Kellas, in trying to convey what the war in Afghanistan is like, reaches out to his friends in London and brings destruction.

"There was curiosity in that reach, and a kind of regret. In any act of hurting there remained the ghost of intimacy."

And unlike laser guided missiles, Kellas struggles to cope with his feelings, "Your own mind (is) a hard thing to manipulate: it had so many automatic processes."

At the end Meek pulls back out from our intimacy with Kellas and we are left watching him from afar. You feel as Meek has helped us to connect with his character and in doing so connect with the political arena that requires more from us of saying "we care" with no action, no feeling, no connection.

James Meek is a novelist. He is well known for three other novels but is better known as a journalist writing about the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan and the crisis of the detention centre of Guantanamo Bay. His last book was the critically acclaimed ‘People’s act of love.’

‘We are now beginning our descent’ is familiar territory for Meek for it does describe some of the political machinations at work in Afghanistan. Some wise lines inform the book and the place of neutrality in war as espoused by the central character Adam Kellas: ‘There’s two ways to be a neutral in a war. One is not to know about it, and the other is not to care.’

Adam Kellas is hired by his newspaper to cover the troubled events in Afghanistan post 9/11. All the world seemed to talk of nothing more than the Taliban and their own harsh war against the Northern Alliance. But Kellas is intoxicated by love, in this unknown wilderness, for another journalist called Astrid. This too is a central concern of the novel. Kellas has an old school friend called McGurgan who lives in Scotland with his wife Sophie (an old flame of Kellas) and children. McGurgan is a successful novelist. McGurgan is a wilder character embroiled in simmering domestic turmoil. Kellas cannot make sense of this and he goes to the US to find out if his novel is going to be successful and to link up with Astrid who now lives in America. Part of Kellas’ problem is his inability to read communications and other people’s feelings properly. He is a skilful war correspondent but the rest of his life is deeply unsatisfying. The title of the book is descriptive of his condition as well as airline speak for continuous travel and arriving at the destination. That is what Kellas is doing constantly.

Passages of Meek’s novel are extremely visceral and descriptive of a war correspondent’s life. One feels that it gets close to the bone of the real war zone and its panoply of weaponry, unpredictable attacks and unusually tense, quiet periods. The character of Mohammed the interpreter rings true honestly in the carnage. But sometimes Kellas feels more like a combatant than a correspondent. The pursuit of Astrid to America heaps disappointment upon disappointment and this marks out his lack of self awareness. The American characters are sketched in quickly, but perceptively. Both his publisher’s agent and bus driver Lloyd are resentful of him for his attacks upon America in print. His friend’s wife Sophie berates him for his lack of boldness. We end with Kellas reunited with Astrid at another psychological impasse. Meek proposes that Kellas is unable to change and must always suffer. He cannot hold his friends. I read the book in fits and starts and grew frustrated at Kellas’ impetuosity and moral weakness. Meek has written a book about the disappointment that love brings to the lovers and the Hamlet like inability to make important decisions in any meaningful way.

According to Freud it is possible to be wrecked by success. Of course it is also possible to be wrecked by failure, and Adam Kellas, the main protagonist of Now We Are Beginning Our Descent is wrecked by both simultaneously.

Adam Kellas, like James Meek himself, is a British war journalist who finds himself covering the war in Afghanistan. While stationed there he starts a deliberately provocative and commercial thriller and also encounters another journalist - an American called Astrid - with whom he rapidly becomes fascinated ('A fascination was what came about when a single life wasn't enough to contain the presence of someone else inside him'). For instance he finds himself thinking about the sound she makes, the 'exhalation with voice which came from her involuntarily' as she takes the load of her rucksack on her back.

A year later, back in the UK, he has finished his thriller and has just received the offer of a six-figure sum from a publisher, and yet he is unhappy. The book, after all, is a cynical reaction to the market place after his previous novels, a little like James Meek's works before The People's Act of Love, haven't sold at all. He has written it to make money and to be read, and it compares unfavourably with the masterpiece of his friend which is being lauded everywhere. He quits his job as a journalist and boards a plane and travels first class to New York and during this journey he tells his story, in flashback, to the woman sitting next to him. Gradually various layers of his life are exposed: explosive, dangerous incidents in both Afghanistan and Britain that have caused him to begin his descent. There are two main pivotal moments: an incident in Afghanistan which makes him question his role as disinterested observer (accidentally he becomes involves and feels guilty) and a dinner-party which is jaw-dropping in its vindictiveness. Both of these are causing him to run away, and yet he is also running towards something too.

But this running away is also a sort of slithering downwards - how much so becomes apparent in one of the major twists in the novel when he reaches New York - and once he starts slithering he can't seem to stop. He runs blindly onwards towards what he thinks he wants but having found it discovers it is not what he wanted at all. It sounds desperate, and in some ways it is, but there is a touch of satisfaction which is not just schadenfreude, because it is only by descending that Adam Kellas can learn that no one ever gets exactly what they want. He has to compromise, and his new acquisition turns out to be more valuable because of that.

This is a hugely satisfying novel, cleverly-constructed, one of the best I have read for some time; the characters, dialogue and settings are fascinating and the story gripping. There are so many beautifully-written passages that I have difficulty picking out just one, but I think it is when Meek describes characters that I admire him the most:

He dressed as if he believed he was a younger, fitter man, in a tight black sweater that clung to his sagging torso. He wore Ray-Bans and had eczema. He was always moving, making jerky little movements of his head, shifting from foot to foot, swinging his body from side to side, like a bird waiting for grain to fall.

It is also a book that incidentally tells a lot about the process of writing - or at least how James Meek writes. It is in part a plea for the purity of the creative process and the idea that a writer should above all write for his or herself as the passenger next to Adam Kellas says 'I like to think there are people out there writing books that I can only read by working hard at it even if I never do read them. I like to think there are writers left who don't give a fuck, you know? "Here's my book. You don't like it, you can go fuck yourself , I don't care."'

Until recently I had the same literary agent as James Meek but although she sold James Meek's last work very successfully - it was a multi-national bestseller - she couldn't sell mine at all and consequently I was dropped. It has been hard finding the motivation to continue but when I read that passage I felt that I should. The business of writing demands obstinacy and perseverance as well as talent and clearly James Meek has much of all three.

I have not yet read any of James Meeks's other works but now feel that I must, very soon, in fact I should think that I'd want to read every word that he writes.