Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie

Up to now, Salman Rushdie has published fifteen novels (if we include his two books for children). The second of those fifteen works, Midnight’s Children (1981) has won the most prizes: the Booker Prize in 1981, the Booker of Bookers in 1993, to mark the 25th anniversary of the Prize since its creation in 1968, and the “Best of the Booker”, a special prize created in 2008, in honour of the 40th anniversary. However it is not an easy book to read: it is particularly long (almost 700 pages in the Viking paperback edition), and although the story, generally speaking, progresses chronologically, the narrative constantly plays with time, using flashbacks to recall past events or jumping into the future by teasing the reader with obscure curses, prophecies, puzzling hints (sometimes explicitly phrased like cinema trailers, “coming soon!”). Therefore the reader is constantly obliged to piece the story together as if it were a puzzle.

What’s more, it is an Indian postcolonial novel, and as such refuses to “explain” to Western readers anything that they might deem unknown or exotic, such as mentions of traditional clothing, words in Hindi, Urdu, Kashmiri, or any of the other languages of India, names and surnames or other distinctive signs of caste or religion… This explains why some of us, feeling rather put off, were unable to finish the whole book. Others among us, however, really enjoyed it; they liked its literary qualities, the exuberant style, the imagery, and Rushdie’s comic genius: some of the scenes are really funny, and he sometimes includes comic elements even in dramatic or tragic circumstances.

Everything starts with the birth of Saleem, the hero, at midnight on the dot, that is 12.00 AM on August 15th, 1947, at the precise moment when the British Indian colony became independent, but was brutally divided into two nations, India and Pakistan, after a bloody process of Partition that involved the transfer of huge numbers of people, with Muslims and Hindus killing each other on the way. This “clock-ridden” birth intentionally pays tribute to the comical beginning of Tristram Shandy which narrates Tristram’s clock-linked conception, but it also makes of Saleem a character who is “handcuffed to history”, and who is brought up to feel special, and to think that the whole history of his country is somehow “his fault”, that he is responsible for all its woes. Indeed the plot covers the years between 1915 and 1978, constantly interweaving the characters’ personal history and the History of the nation.

The novel is a love song to India, and to Bombay in particular. Rushdie’s India deliberately steers clear from orientalist clichés: it is chaotic, noisy, hot, vulgar, infinitely diverse and variegated. Rushdie “celebrates hybridity, impurity, hotchpotch”; he « rejoices in mongrelization and fears the absolutism of the Pure” as he puts it in an essay. Midnight’s Children is a teeming book, full of secondary stories framed within the plot, and plays with genres, with the surreal, the burlesque, the magical. Saleem, the child of a departing Englishman and a poor Indian woman, exchanged at birth with the legitimate baby of a rich middle-class family, is both a bastard and a changeling: thus he is a usurper, who will experience a secure, cherished childhood before falling on hard times, living as a pauper in the magicians’ ghetto in Delhi and being persecuted by Indira and Sanjay Gandhi during the State of Emergency, between 1975 and 1977. Saleem is the first-person narrator of the novel, and uses familiar, lively, colourful language. He is a “swallower of lives”, and we, readers, are forced to swallow a whole world if we wish to understand him. In his loud, histrionic way, taking Scheherazade as his model, Saleem loves to dramatize his role as a yarn spinner: the novel is highly metafictional, and foregrounds the way in which Saleem tries out the effect of his tales on his narratee, Padma. He loves to tease his readers, unveiling his story in snatches, just as his grandmother was brought to reveal her body to her doctor, small bit by small bit, through the round hole in a sheet.

Rushdie, similarly to what Paul Auster did in Moon Palace, was trying to keep the balance between fragmentation and a deliberate shunning of linearity on the one hand, and on the other a desire to make numerous connexions in order to create meaning. Among Rushdie’s influences and references are Eastern tales and mythologies (The Arabian Nights in particular), but also the Western tradition of the comic, burlesque novel, which includes Cervantes, Rabelais, L. Sterne and J. Swift, and the magic realism of South American novelists. Rushdie also loves to include popular culture, and has a fondness for the superheroes of the Marvel and DC comics. Rushdie’s name is universally known, but for the wrong reasons, and he deserves to be read  as much as he is hated, threatened and attacked by all sorts of people, most of whom have not read a single sentence of his work. He is indeed one of the major contemporary writers of fiction in English.

Catherine Miquel