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552 pages Reprint
edition (April 1995)
Penguin USA
(Paper); ISBN: 0140132708
Amazon.com
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
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