Source of book: I own this.
Any of us who were around back in the 1980s should remember the huge hullabaloo surrounding Salman Rushdie. A seemingly ordinary book, The Satanic Verses, came to the attention of the fundamentalist regime in Iran, leading to a fatwa authorizing the murder of its author, previously known mostly to readers of modern literary fiction for his magical realism and historical fiction set in India.
As I discuss in my post about that book, it seems clear that the mullahs never actually read the book - they just wanted a channel for their hate and violence. This is also the case for the vast majority of Fundie book banners here in the US as well. Rather than engage with ideas, they channel their hate against those who tell the truth and encourage different perspectives.
Midnight’s Children was Rushdie’s first big hit. It not only won the Booker prize, but later won the “Best of the Bookers” - a recognition that it is the best novel ever to win the prize. It is kind of ironic, therefore, that most people only know his name because of The Satanic Verses and the attempts on Rushdie’s life.
The book itself is, like Rushdie’s other books from the 1980s, rather long - nearly 600 pages. I was noticing that it was a very different era for publishing. Literary authors such as Rushdie and Umberto Eco, to just name two I have read fairly recently, were able to get the green light for long, sprawling, epic books. These days, most genres (including literary fiction) have word limits, and publishers seem less inclined to take risks.
Rushdie himself mentioned several books and authors that influenced him, and I can definitely see a few of them in Midnight’s Children.
The first is David Copperfield. Rushdie enjoyed Dickens as a child, as did I, and there is definitely some similarity here. Both are about the childhood and young adulthood of a boy. Both illuminate social issues, and satirize both personalities and politics of their era.
The second is Tristram Shandy. That shockingly modernist masterpiece of the 18th Century shares the non-linear narrative structure of many modern works. In relation to Midnight’s Children, both books take a long time to even get to the birth of their narrators. In this case, 150 pages go by before Saleem manages to get born, and before that comes a narrative that jumps around, telling of Saleem’s ancestors.
The third is One Hundred Years of Solitude. Clearly Rushdie adopted the Magical Realism style itself, but there are also other parallels. For example, both books use the characters as metaphors for the country itself. Saleem is born at midnight exactly when India gained its independence. From that point on, his life is intertwined with the nation, and, well, things he does affect politics as much as politics affect him. I could list a bunch of other sly nods to Marquez’ book (just like there are a lot in The Satanic Verses), but I’ll just encourage people to read both, and hunt for the Easter Eggs.
That said, don’t get me wrong. Midnight’s Children is definitely not derivative. It is its own creative work, and rather unique.
Saleem Sinai is one of those “Midnight’s Children,” born between midnight and 1 AM on the day of independence. These several hundred children all have some degree of magical powers, and are able to communicate with each other as children via Saleem’s mind.
But this is only a little of the plot of the book, and not even the most important. The two main stories are that of Saleem and his family, and the greater history of India and Pakistan in the several decades leading up to independence and the three decades afterward.
If you are unfamiliar with this history - and I definitely was - the book does a great job of incorporating it without getting bogged down. This means that you can learn as much or as little as you wish. For me, I looked things up as the book went along, and I thought it gave good context. But you can enjoy the book without these digressions if you wish.
As with any Rushdie book, there is plenty of satire. And it is spread around broadly. Expect every religion to get at least one barb thrown at it - and atheism too. No political party or movement is spared. No one is venerated.
Some of these may go over the head of American readers - I know I must have missed some of the in-jokes that Indians and Pakistanis would get. But a lot of them are so universal. Charlatans, politicians, and mystics are found in every culture, after all. As are adultery, prostitution, unhoused people, and amoral capitalists. Just to name a few.
This book is really sprawling, very much like those older influences. This is not a bad thing. Don’t read a book like this for a tight plot - it is a life story, not a murder mystery. Instead, enjoy how much is contained in it. It is a whole world, seen through the narrator’s eyes, in all its color and personality and complexity.
There are, like in a Dickens novel, a lot of characters. I found it helpful to keep Wikipedia’s list of characters handy, particularly for when a character from a few hundred pages prior reappears.
Unlike a Dickens novel, Rushdie writes believable female characters, several of which play significant roles in this book. Because of the first-person perspective, we don’t get directly inside their heads, but they are not cardboard cutouts.
I rather enjoyed the book, and I do think Rushdie is a fine writer, with a wonderful command of the English language. Here is the opening of the book, which drew me in right away.
I was born in the city of Bombay…once upon a time. No, that won’t do, there’s no getting away from the date: I was born in Doctor Narlikar’s Nursing Home on August 15th, 1947. And the time? The time matters too. Well then: at night. No, it’s important to be more… On the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact. Clock-hands joined palms in respectful greeting as I came. Oh, spell it out, spell it out: at the precise instant of India’s arrival at independence, I tumbled forth into the world. There were gasps. And, outside the window, fireworks and crowds. A few seconds later, my father broke his big toe; but his accident was a mere trifle when set beside what had befallen me in that benighted moment, because thanks to the occult tyrannies of those blandly saluting clocks I had been mysteriously handcuffed to history, my destinies indissolubly chained to those of my country. For the next three decades, there was to be no escape. Soothsayers had prophesied me, newspapers celebrated my arrival, politicoes ratified my authenticity. I was left entirely without a say in the matter. I, Saleem Sinai, later variously called Snotnose, Stainface, Baldy, Sniffer, Buddha and even Piece-of-the-Moon, had become heavily embroiled in Fate - at the best of times a dangerous sort of involvement. And I couldn’t even wipe my own nose at the time.
This also gives an idea of the style. Saleem is telling his story to his mistress, Padma, and writing it down. This explains many of the discursions, as he has to explain things to Padma, who lacks knowledge of all his family history, to say nothing of all the other characters in the book.
The magical realism goes hand-in-hand with a great deal of ambivalence about the supernatural, about gods and religion. Which is an interesting twist on the usual formula. I loved this line about Saleem’s grandfather.
And my grandfather, lurching upright, made a resolve. Stood. Rolled cheroot. Stared across the lake. And was knocked forever into that middle place, unable to worship a God in whose existence he could not wholly disbelieve.
In contrast to the skeptical Aadam Aziz is his wife, the devout and indeed superstitious Naseem, later referred to as Reverend Mother.
She had become a prematurely old, wide woman, with two enormous moles like witch’s nipples on her face; and she lived within an invisible fortress of her own making, an iron-clad citadel of traditions and certainties.
That last line is perceptive - and I definitely know people like that.
By the time of the narration, Saleem has become the proprietor of a pickle and chutney making factory, and indeed, has bottled a chutney for each chapter of the book. Because Saleem’s other superpower is smell (he can smell emotions), fragrance is woven throughout the book, and green chutney - “grasshopper green” - serves a significant symbolic purpose, and recurs throughout the story.
So let me obfuscate no further: I, Saleem Sinai, possessor of the most delicately-gifted olfactory organ in history, have dedicated my latter days to the large-scale preparation of condiments. But now, ‘A cook?’ you gasp in horror. ‘A khansama merely? How is it possible?’ And, I grant, such mastery of the multiple gifts of cookery and language is rare indeed; yet I possess it. You are amazed; but then I am not, you see, one of your 200-rupees-a-month cookery johnnies, but my own master, working beneath saffron and green winking of my personal neon goddess. And my chutneys and kasaundies are, after all, connected to my nocturnal scribblings - by day amongst the pickle vats, by night within these sheets, I spend my time at the great work of preserving. Memory, as well as fruit, is being saved from the corruption of the clocks.
Later in the book, during one of the recurrences of this idea, comes this passage.
Because I sniffed the air; and scented, behind the solicitous expressions of my visitors, a sharp whiff of danger. I intended to defend myself; but I required the assistance of chutney.
Here is another passage that is delicious:
Family history, of course, has its proper dietary laws. One is supposed to swallow and digest only the permitted parts of it, the halal portions of the past, drained of their redness, their blood. Unfortunately, this makes the stories less juicy; so I am about to become the first and only member of my family to flout the laws of halal. Letting no blood escape from the body of the tale, I arrive at the unspeakable part; and, undaunted, press on.
The Tristram Shandy-style joke here is that he most certainly is not about to get to the point. He has dozens of pages to go before that happens.
Saleem’s nanny is a young woman, Mary, who has a huge role in the story, not least of which because she switched babies at birth. One of the fun digressions is this bit about her experience in Catholic school.
‘Blue,’ the young priest said earnestly. ‘All available evidence, my daughter, suggests that Our Lord Christ Jesus was the most beauteous, crystal shade of pale sky blue.’
The little woman behind the wooden latticed window of the confessional fell silent for a moment. An anxious, cogitating silence. Then: ‘But how, Father? People are not blue. No people are blue in the whole big world!’
Bewilderment of the little woman, matched by perplexity of the priest…because this is not how she’s supposed to react. The Bishop had said, ‘Problems with recent converts…when they ask about colour they’re almost always that…important to build bridges my son. Remember,’ thus spake the Bishop, ‘God is love; and the Hindu love-god, Krishna, is always depicted with blue skin. Tell them blue; it will be a sort of bridge between the faiths; gently does it, you follow; and besides blue is a neutral sort of color, avoids the usual colour problems, gets you way from black and white; yes, on the whole I’m sure it’s the one to choose.’
I was unable to find anything to suggest that this was actually taught, but I do wonder if Rushdie experienced it somewhere. It seems too good to have been made up, too implausible for fiction.
There is a good bit of philosophizing by the narrator, not least about the whole idea of India. After all, prior to the British colonization, India was a patchwork of small entities. The giant nation, cobbled together from multiple religions, languages, and ethnicities, was a modern invention.
August in Bombay: a month of festivals, the month of Krishna’s birthday and Coconut Day; and this year - fourteen hours to go, thirteen, twelve - there was an extra festival on the calendar, a new myth to celebrate, because a nation which had never previously existed was about to win its freedom, catapulting us into a world which, although it had five thousand years of history, although it had invented the game of chess and traded with Middle Kingdom Egypt, was nevertheless quite imaginary; into a mythical land, a country which would never exist except by the efforts of a phenomenal collective will - except in a dream we all agreed to dream; it was a mass fantasy shared in varying degrees by Bengali and Punjabi, Madrasa and Jat, and would periodically need the sanctification and renewal which can only be provided by rituals of blood. India, the new myth - a collective fiction in which anything was possible, a fable rivalled only by the two other mighty fantasies: money and God.
That passage took my breath away. Wow.
Here is another that resonated with my own experience.
It had already occurred to me that our family believed implicitly in good business principles; they expected a handsome return for their investment in me. Children get food shelter pocketmoney 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. ‘There are no strings on me!’ they sing; but I, Pinocchio, saw the strings. Parents are impelled by the profit motive - nothing more, nothing less. For their attentions, they expected, from me, the immense dividend of greatness.
Yeah, it took me a while to see the strings. “Greatness” in the way my parents expected it was a validation of their political, cultural, and religious beliefs - when I failed to share some of those preferences, I was failing to repay them for their investment. Sigh.
The family dynamics in Saleem’s family are interesting. As the first-born, and as a male, he has some definite privilege in a way that his younger sister never has. To make things worse, she is a rough-and-tumble sort, loud and full of mischief. Due to her unusual hair color, the family calls her “the Brass Monkey,” a moniker that only goes away when she becomes a famous singer.
But, at a few crucial junctures in the story, Saleem finds himself on the outs, and his sister unexpectedly - and to her horror - becomes the favorite.
Even the Brass Monkey was satisfied by my show of contrition - in her eyes, I had returned to form, and was once more the goody-two-shoes of the family. To demonstrate her willingness to re-establish the old order, she set fire to my mother’s favorite slippers, and regained her rightful place in the family doghouse.
The problem for Saleem was that he had discovered his gift of reading minds, and yet had to hide it, because his parents neither believed him nor approved. There is another interesting line in this regard, after Saleem admits he used his powers to cheat on school tests.
This behavior - not, I confess, the behavior of a hero - was the direct result of a confusion in his mind, which invariably muddled up morality - the desire to do what is right - and popularity - the rather more dubious desire to do what is approved of.
Oh man, this is a sore point for me. I’m not good at dissembling, and I’m not a popularity chaser. I have always had my own code of morality that matters more to me than approval. Furthermore, all too many of my pointless conflicts with my family have been over this issue. I wanted to do what I believed was right, while they wanted me to do what they approved of. Which were not the same thing.
Here is another interesting bit, a critique of human nature throughout time, but certainly resonant in the Trump Era.
Think of this: history, in my version, entered a new phase on August 15th, 1947 - but in another version, that inescapable date is no more than one fleeting instant in the Age of Darkness, Kali-Yuga, in which the cow of morality has been reduced to standing, teeteringly, on a single leg! Kali-Yuga - the losing throw in our national dice game; the worst of everything; the age in which property gives man rank, when wealth is equated with virtue, when passion becomes the sole bond between men and women, when falsehood brings success (is it any wonder, in such a time, that I too have been confused about good and evil?) … began on Friday, February 18, 3102 B.C.; and will last a mere 432,000 years!
This concept is later applied to the Midnight’s Children.
But it is Kali-Yuga; the children of the hour of darkness were born, I’m afraid, in the midst of the age of darkness; so that although we found it easy to be brilliant, we were always confused about being good.
In addition to the confusion of good and evil, there is also a confusion of what is real and not throughout the book. The family moves from Bombay to Karachi midway through Saleem’s childhood.
It was, in those days, a city of mirages; hewn from the desert, it had not wholly succeeded in destroying the desert’s power. Oases shone in the tarmac of Elphinstone Street, caravanserais were glimpsed shimmering amongst the hovels around the black bridge, the Kala Pul. In the rainless city (whose only common factor with the city of my birth was that it, too, had started life as a fishing village), the hidden desert retained its ancient powers for apparition-mongering, with the result that Karachiites had only the slipperiest of grasps on reality, and were therefore willing to turn to their leaders for advice on what was real and what was not.
In so many ways, that describes MAGA Land perfectly. It also fits with Saleem’s comparison of the Islamic authoritarianism of Pakistan with the “highly-spiced nonconformity of Bombay.” Something else that those of us who grew up in cosmopolitan cities experience in contrast to white enclaves in small towns.
Another observation he has about places dominated by right-wing fundamentalist religion:
“No city which locks women away is ever short of whores.”
As Saleem grows to manhood, India and Pakistan go to war over Kashmir. Saleem has an interesting theory about why.
If it happened, what were the motives? Again, a rash of possible explanations: the continuing anger which had been stirred up by the Rann of Kutch; the desire to settle, once-and-for-all, the old issue of who-should-possess-the-Perfect-Valley? … Or one which didn’t get into the papers: the pressures of internal political troubles in Pakistan - Ayub’s government was tottering, and a war works wonders at such times.
One of the craziest chapters in the book is “In the Sudarbans.” Saleem, suffering from amnesia due to a close bomb strike, has been sent by the military to fight at the border of what would eventually be Bangladesh. He decides to flee the battlefield, leading his three team-mates down the river into the Sundarbans, the coastal mangrove swamps.
The descriptions here are vivid, from the endless rain to the leaches that cover the body at night. And the Nipa Fruit - something we grow here in the warm parts of California as an ornamental.
After his escape from the war, an imprisonment, and rescue by Parvati-the-Witch (another of the Midnight’s Children), he finds himself seeking some sort of comfort and self-knowledge.
[N]ow, seated hunched over paper in a pool of Anglepoised light, I no longer want to be anything except who I am. Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I’ve gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each ‘I’, every one of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude. I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you’ll have to swallow a world.
None of India’s leaders are presented in a particularly positive light, but Indira Ghandi is particularly targeted. Her declaration of martial law and imprisonment of tens of thousands of people for political reasons was pretty shameful, and Rushdie takes aim at this incident near the end of the book.
All sorts of things happen during an Emergency: trains run on time, black-money hoarders are frightened into paying taxes, even the weather is brought to heel, and bumper harvests are reaped; there is, I repeat, a white part as well as a black.
For the record, despite claims to the contrary, the trains did not run on time under Mussolini.
But what I learned from the Widow’s Hand is that those who would be gods fear no one so much as other potential deities; and that, that and that only, is why we, the magical children of midnight, were hated feared destroyed by the Widow, who was not only Prime Minister of India but also aspired to be the Devi, the Mother-goddess in her most terrible aspect, possessor of the shakti of the gods, a multi-limbed divinity with a centre-parting and schizophrenic hair…
The book is divided into three sections. The first is about Saleem’s ancestors, the second about his childhood through becoming an adult, the third about his adult life. I found the third part to be the most political and the weakest part of the story. Perhaps because children are more interesting than adults? Or the politics took more of a center stage because the adult Saleem was less insulated from politics? Whatever the case, the last part of the book felt a bit less magical than the first two parts.
That said, I really did enjoy this book a lot, and recommend Rushdie as an author. That he is best known for being the target of religious violence is a shame, because he should be best known for writing imaginative, unusual, and magical works of fiction that illuminate the world we live in from a perspective we Americans often ignore.
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