Midnight's
Children
by Salman Rushdie
Winner of the Booker Prize
Anyone who has spent time in the developing world will know that one
of Bombay's claims to fame is the enormous film industry that churns out
hundreds of musical fantasies each year. The other, of course, is native
son Salman Rushdie--less prolific, perhaps than Bollywood, but in his own
way just as fantastical. Though Rushdie's novels lack the requisite six
musical numbers that punctuate every Bombay talkie, they often share basic
plot points with their cinematic counterparts. Take, for example, his 1980
Booker Prize-winning Midnight's Children: two children born at the stroke
of midnight on August 15, 1947--the moment at which India became an independent
nation--are switched in the hospital. The infant scion of a wealthy Muslim
family is sent to be raised in a Hindu tenement, while the legitimate heir
to such squalor ends up establishing squatters' rights to his unlucky hospital
mate's luxurious bassinet. Switched babies are standard fare for a Hindi
film, and one can't help but feel that Rushdie's world-view--and certainly
his sense of the fantastical--has been shaped by the films of his childhood.
But whereas the movies, while entertaining, are markedly mediocre, Midnight's
Children is a masterpiece, brilliant written, wildly unpredictable, hilarious
and heartbreaking in equal measure.
Rushdie's narrator, Saleem Sinai, is the Hindu child raised by wealthy
Muslims. Near the beginning of the novel, he informs us that he is falling
apart--literally: I mean quite simply that I have begun to crack all over
like an old jug--that my poor body, singular, unlovely, buffeted by
too much history, subjected to drainage above and drainage below, mutilated
by doors, brained by spittoons, has started coming apart at the seams.
In short, I am literally disintegrating, slowly for the moment, although
there are signs of an acceleration.
In light of this unfortunate physical degeneration, Saleem has decided
to write his life story, and, incidentally, that of India's, before he
crumbles into "(approximately) six hundred and thirty million particles
of anonymous, and necessarily oblivious, dust." It seems that within one
hour of midnight on India's independence day, 1,001 children were born.
All of those children were endowed with special powers: some can travel
through time, for example; one can change gender. Saleem's gift is telepathy,
and it is via this power that he discovers the truth of his birth: that
he is, in fact, the product of the illicit coupling of an Indian mother
and an English father, and has usurped another's place. His gift also reveals
the identities of all the other children and the fact that it is in his
power to gather them for a "midnight parliament" to save the nation. To
do so, however, would lay him open to that other child, christened Shiva,
who has grown up to be a brutish killer. Saleem's dilemma plays out against
the backdrop of the first years of independence: the partition of India
and Pakistan, the ascendancy of "The Widow" Indira Gandhi, war, and, eventually,
the imposition of martial law.
We've seen this mix of magical thinking and political reality before
in the works of Günter Grass and Gabriel García Márquez. What sets Rushdie
apart is his mad prose pyrotechnics, the exuberant acrobatics of rhyme
and alliteration, pun, wordplay, proper and "Babu" English chasing each
other across the page in a dizzying, exhilarating cataract of words. Rushdie
can be laugh-out-loud funny, but make no mistake--this is an angry book,
and its author's outrage lends his language wings. Midnight's Children
is Salman Rushdie's irate, affectionate love song to his native land--not
so different from a Bombay talkie, after all. --Alix Wilber - Amazon.com
Paperback: 552 pages
Penguin USA
(Paper); ISBN: 0140132708; Reprint edition (April 1995) |
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