Midnight’s Children
Author: Salman Rushdie 1980 533 pp
My rating: 4*
Started September 30 2008, Finished October 12 2008.

Serious, rich and challenging literature of the highest of aspirations, which a reader can enjoy without fully comprehending though a study guide and/or multiple readings would undoubtedly deepen ones enjoyment, understanding and satisfaction. Midnight’s Children scores top marks for authorial vision, ambition and sense of mission. So why don’t I give it five stars? In short readability -- most importantly, the plot does not generate a lot of momentum, a shortcoming that is not helped by the profusion of Indian, Hindu and Muslim names (Wikipedia lists 41 major characters) and terms which, however necessary to the tale being told, are completely unfamiliar to the western reader and thus tend to break reading concentration and flow on a regular basis; for example, while writing this, I randomly turned to page 151 and noted the following names, most of which are not present elsewhere in the book: Zohra, Narlikar, Warden Road, Mahalaxmi Temple, Willingdon Club, Vallabhbhai Patel Stadium, Bano Dev the Invincible Woman, Dara Singh, Haji Ali, Vellard, Worli, Mahim, Salsette, Maunga, Colaba and Mazagaon.

The novel, essentially the life story of its narrator, Saleem Sinai, is a parable of the partition birth of India and Pakistan and the subsequent first thirty years of those countries. Saleem was born exactly at midnight on 15 August 1947, making his own growth symbolic of India’s. He comes to discover that he and the other 1001 Indian children born during that hour each have a unique superhuman property and that the closer to midnight one was born, the more potent the power. Saleem’s power is telepathy, the ability to enter other people’s minds and know their thoughts and feelings. The other of the midnight children born at that first instant and thus possessing a comparable power is Saleem’s nemesis, the ominous Shiva whose power, as in Hindu myth, is destruction. Saleem’s family is Muslim, but chooses not relocate to Pakistan after the partition, although eventually circumstances force them to move there during Saleem’s teenage years. For Saleem, India past, present and future, is a country brimming with life and possibility while Pakistan is a still-born trouble spot dominated by a “we are the state” military, “ … a country where the truth is what it is instructed to be, reality quite literally ceases to exist, so that everything becomes possible except what we are told is the case; and maybe this was the difference between my Indian childhood and Pakistani adolescence -- that in the first I was beset by an infinity of alternative realities, while in the second I was adrift, disorientated, amid an equally infinite number of falsenesses, unrealities and lies.” (373)

The book is a pillar of the magic realism style, along with such postwar classics as 100 Years of Solitude and The Tin Drum. From what I’ve read of India, life there is fairly surreal in the first place, so a more realistic depiction may have served the author better, at least with the western reader, by grounding it to a more plausible reality. The lack of believable human continuity from one chapter to the next prevented me from becoming fully engrossed in the work -- since Saleem is much more a symbol than a an attempt to depict a relatable person, it is hard to really connect with him.

Near the end, the author provides a critique of his own work: “The process of revision should be constant and endless; don’t think I’m satisfied with what I’ve done.” (530) He then enumerates plot points, characters and scenes which do not sit quite right with him.

Saleem ends up as a pickler in a chutney factory, the preserving of scents and tastes as a metaphor for history. In fact, to Saleem, each chapter in the book represents a jar of pickles. And this reader was puzzled by the transcendently moving final two pages, are they Saleem’s post-mortem dream and an attempt to see the future?

What does Saleem’s cracking symbolize?

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Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence. (14)

Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems -- but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible. (189)