"Midnight's Children" by Salman Rushdie

By Shiva_as_the_Lord_of_Dance_LACMA.jpg, photographed by the LACMA.derivative work: Julia\talk, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14771931

Winner of the Best of the Bookers: the prize for the best Booker Prize winning novel (1981) in the first forty years of the prize. It also won the 1981 James Tait prize.

Saleem Sinai is born at the stroke of midnight, at the exact same time as the nation of India is born (achieving independence from the British Raj on 15th August 1947). At the age of ten he discovers he has telepathic powers; all the children born within the first hour of India's independence have one superpower or another. His story and the story of his family are inextricably linked with the story of India.

Saleem's life does indeed seem to follow the trajectory of the prophecy made shortly before he was born.

It's an epic both in size and in its attempt to "embody the history and aspirations of a nation" (which is part of the definition of epic in the Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory). 

It is narrated by Saleem as an older man (therefore past tense, first person) to his paramour, pickle maker Padma, who delightfully critiques his narration (this reminded me of Jeffrey Farnol's The Geste of Duke Jocelyn) and repeatedly switches into Saleem's present. It's discursiveness and the fact that Saleem's birth doesn't happen until the 25% mark, reminded me of Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne. 

It is peopled by a cast of eccentrics worth of Dickens, The central section of the book was for me the best. It follows Saleem through his childhood, and we meet his mates Eyeslice and Hairoil and Cyris the Great and Sonny and Evie Lilith Burns and the adult neighbours such as (naval) Commander Sabarmati, film magnate (and thus employer of Saleem's uncle Hanif) Homi Catrack, Doctor Schaapsteker ... One of the merits of the book is that there are so many characters and they are all memorable (and many of them pop up later) but they are caricatures, flat characters, who can be summed up in a few lines and who never change despite the contortions of the convoluted plot.

Many of the characters change their names. Saleem himself gets nicknamed Snotnose and Sniffer and Stainface, Baldy and Piece-of-the-Moon; he later becomes the buddha.  His sister Brass Monkey becomes Jamila Singer. His mother was Mumtaz Aziz and is Amina Sinai. Her first husband is Nadir Khan who later becomes Nasir Qasim. Cyrus the Great becomes Lord Kushro Khusrovand. Identity and its ability to change is one of the themes of the book. I loved so many of the characters. 

The only other of the Children of Midnight born as the clock chimed, in the same hospital as Saleem, is Shiva, a Hindu deity often depicted as the four-armed Lord of the Dance, one of whose attributes is as destroyer. But Saleem believes that he himself is the catalyst who brings death on his friends and relatives. The hero as destroyer seems to be another of the themes of this book; this reminded me of Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch. 

There are other recurrent motifs such as noses (Saleem's is enormous, a "cyranose" and, once cleared, is able to smell emotions) and spittoons.

This is a hugely entertaining book and some moments of great humour.

Selected quotes:

• “Clock-hands joined in respectful greeting as I came” (Book One: The Perforated Sheet)
• “His face was a sculpture of wind on water: ripples made of hide.” (Book One: The Perforated Sheet)
• “I sit like an empty pickle jar in a pool of Anglepoised light.” (Book One: The Perforated Sheet)
• “I wish, at times, for a more discerning audience, someone who would understand the need for rhythm, pacing, The subtle introduction of minor chords which will later rise, swell, seize the melody.” (Book One: Methwold)
• “To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world.” (Book One: Tick Tock)
• “In those days, Bombay had been declared a dry state. the only way to get a drink or to get yourself certified as an alcoholic; and so a new breed of doctors sprang up.” (Book Two: The Fisherman's Pointing Finger)
• “All games have morals; and the game of Snakes and Ladders captures, as no other activity can hope to do, the eternal truth that for every ladder you climb, a snake is waiting just around the corner; and for every snake, a ladder will compensate.” (Book Two: Snakes and Ladders)
• “Children get food shelter pocket-money longholidays and love, all of it apparently free gratis, and most of the little fools think it's a sort of compensation for having been born.” (Book Two: Accident In A Washing Chest)
• “Old people shroud themselves in the past during a war; that way they're ready to die whenever required.” (Book Two: Accident In A Washing Chest)
• “The sad mature wisdom of dirty washing lingered with me, teaching me its philosophy of coolness and dignity-despite-everything and the terrible inevitability of soap.” (Book Two: Accident In A Washing Chest)
• “Maya ... may be defined as all that is illusory; as trickery, artifice and deceit, apparitions, phantasms, mirages, sleight-of-hand, the seeming form of things: all these are parts of Maya.” (Book Two: At the Pioneer Cafe)
• “Cocksure men do terrible deeds. Women, too.” (Book Two: At the Pioneer Cafe)
• “You got to get what you can, do what you can with it, and then you've got to die.” (Book Two: At the Pioneer Cafe)
• “Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence.” (Book Two: Alpha and Omega)
• “Unconscious in the night-shadow of a mosque, I was saved by the exhaustion of ammunition dumps.” (Book Three: The buddha)

August 2024; 647 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God