Midnight’s Children won the Booker Prize in 1981 and was judged the best of the Bookers both in 1993 and 2008. I anticipated something outstanding. It certainly seemed so in the early pages:
“One Kashmiri morning in the early spring of 1915, my grandfather Aadam Aziz hit his nose against a frost-hardened tussock of earth while attempting to pray. Three drops of blood plopped out of his left nostril, hardened instantly in the brittle air and lay before his eyes on the prayer-mat, transformed into rubies. Lurching back until he knelt with his head once more upright, he found that the tears which had sprung to his eyes had solidified, too; and at that moment, as he brushed diamonds contemptuously from his lashes, he resolved never to kiss the earth again for any god or man.”
Yet, several times as I read through (and it is long), I began to think of it as a four star book rather than five.
It tells the story of Saleem Sinai and his family, and the way that story intertwines with the bloody conflicts of the Indian subcontinent. We learn about the horror of the Amritsar Massacre in 1919 when the British Army opened fire upon a crowd of unarmed civilians killing 379 and injuring over 1,200, Indian independence and the partition of Pakistan in 1947, the Bangladeshi wars of 1971-72, and the bulldozing of the Delhi slums and forced sterilization programme of 1976. Country and family are intricately interconnected: Saleem believes he shapes history and that history destroys his family. This, though, is the fictional Saleem’s fictionalised version of history: “... in autobiography... what actually happened is less important than what the author can manage to persuade his audience to believe...” (p270)
It assaults the senses with all the terrible noise, dirt, heat and stench of India, and its awful, heaving inequalities. There are wailing widows, midgets, giants, army officers, magicians, film stars, black burqas, poverty, illness, deformity, addiction and disability. Old men crouch in the dust beside the road chewing betel nuts, expectorating streams of red liquid into a spittoon placed further and further away, while street urchins dodge past, playing chicken. Saleem Sinai has an enormous nose which is congested with mucus and constantly drips snot.
The central conceit is that the thousand and one children born during the hour after midnight on the 15th August, 1947, the moment of Indian independence, have magical powers. One can change sex at will, another can eat metal, one can travel through time and yet another can perform real magic. Those born closest to midnight have the greatest powers: Saleem, born on the stroke of the hour, is telepathic and can read minds. All of the Midnight’s Children are able to communicate through him. He hopes that they will work together towards the good of India, but they disagree, and their powers are seen as a threat. Later, Saleem loses his telepathy but gains a hyper-sensitive sense of smell.
Saleem portrays politicians as ridiculous and corrupt. Prime Minister Morarji Desai drinks his own urine for its health benefits (absolutely true, “the water of life”; and if you think that’s disgusting you might prefer bottled cow urine instead, available from at least one London shop on the shelf underneath the naan bread; Desai, by the way, lived to the age of ninety-nine; one wonders what he would have reached had he not drunk so much of his own pee).
The Nehru-Gandhi clan comes off worst. Indira Gandhi perpetrates electoral fraud, economic corruption, wars, genocide, and the destruction of the Midnight’s Children. With them she destroys all promise and hope for a better India. She is “The Widow”, portrayed as a wicked witch with centre-parted hair “snow-white on one side, blackasnight on the other, so that, depending on which profile she presented, she resembled either a stoat or an ermine”, an analogue of her economy. Her 1975 State of Emergency brought about the suspension of civil rights, the jailing of political opponents, slum clearances and the compulsory sterilization of over six million lower class men. The sterilization programme was overseen by her eldest son, Sanjay Gandhi, who has “lips like a woman’s labia” (you will never look at photographs of him in the same way again).
During the 1982 Festival of India in London, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who had clearly not read the book, invited Salman Rushdie to lunch with Mrs. Gandhi. Rushdie declined. The lunch went ahead without him, during which Mrs. Thatcher said that she thought Midnight’s Children “a fine contribution to the Anglo-Indian cultural bond”. Indira Gandhi sat impassive and stony-faced.
The passage Mrs. Gandhi found most offensive was an accusation that she caused her husband’s death by cruelly neglecting him. She sued for libel at the High Court in London, and won. The passage was removed from all future editions. Libel by a fictional character is still libel.
Why did I doubt the brilliance of the book? The problem lies in its length and complexity, the frequent digression, the unfamiliar cultural, religious and geographical references, and the enormous cast of characters. It is like a Victorian or Russian novel. I think Rushdie must have done this deliberately to reflect the disorder of crowded, intermingling lives. Despite him giving them distinctive names such as Hairoil, Nussie the Duck and The Brass Monkey (names which sometimes change), I found it hard to remember how they all fitted in, or to care.
I did find myself thinking about the story a lot after reading (always the sign of a good book), and writing this has helped clarify things. Having now found lists of characters and vocabulary, I would get more out of it a second time, perhaps in a year or so.
