India celebrated its independence from the British Empire shortly after midnight on August 15, 1947. No, Salman Rushdie wasn’t born on that precise day and hour—he arrived on the scene 57 days earlier, the son of a middle-class Muslim family in Mumbai. But Rushdie's most famous protagonist, Saleem Sinai takes his first breath at the very moment of his nation's release from colonial control. As a result, Saleem’s photo is featured in the Times of India , and the infant receives a congratulatory letter from Prime Minister Nehru:
"Dear Baby Saleem, My belated congratulations on the happy accident of your moment of birth! You are the newest bearer of that ancient face of India which is also eternally young. We shall be watching over your life with the closest attention; it will be, in a sense, a mirror of our own."
Nehru’s words come true with a vengeance—not just for Saleem, but for his whole cohort of "midnight’s children," those hundreds of others also born on August 15, 1947. In a strange quirk of fate, each of these youngsters was given some magical power, and the closer their time of birth approached the midnight moment of independence, the more impressive the ability. Saleem learns during his adolescence that he has been given the power of telepathy. Others who share his birthday, can turn base metals into gold, travel in time, enchant strangers with their preternatural beauty, and perform a host of other miracles. This remarkable cadre includes "Kerala, a boy who had the ability of stepping into mirrors and re-emerging through any reflective surface—through lakes and (with greater difficulty) the polished metal bodies of automobiles…and a Goanese girl with the gift of multiplying fish…and children with the powers of transformation: a werewolf from the Nilgiri Hills, and from the great watershed of the Vindhyas, a boy who could increase or reduce his size at will…."
We have now entered the realm of so-called magical realism , and Rushdie doesn't hold back in infusing his novel with the mystical, the implausible and the wholly impossible. Our author is clearly indebted to Gabriel García Márquez , whose influence hovers over almost every aspect of this work. (And I would have hoped for one further step of emulation—the inclusion of a family tree as a frontispiece would have been a great aid in this novel with almost 100 significant characters, around half of them related by blood or marriage.) But Rushdie incorporates, if anything, even more magic into his novel than does his Colombian role model. That said, he does not stint on the realism, and stuffs his novel full of the historical and political events of India and Pakistan during the first several decades of independence.
We encounter the optimism of the early days of Indian statehood, the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi the following year, the Five Year Plan of the early 1950s, the conflicts with Pakistan and China, the rise to power of Indira Gandhi, the Bangladesh liberation war, India’s development of nuclear weapons, the Indian state of emergency and suppression of political opposition of 1975-1977, and other incidents, minor and major, of the era.
Scholars and critics typically take on the task of drawing the symbolic connections between world- historical events and the quirky personal exploits of the characters who inhabit a work of fiction. But Rushdie has already done this work for us—in almost laborious detail. A significant portion of Midnight’s Children reads like the mutterings of a fastidious literary critic, as the narrator expounds on the many linkages between characters, symbols and events. "As a people we are obsessed with correspondences," Rushdie writes at one point in this novel. "Similarities between this and that, between apparently unconnected things, make us clap our hands delightedly when we find them out. It is a sort of national longing for form—or perhaps simply an expression of our deep belief that forms lie hidden within reality; that meaning reveals itself only in flashes." Certainly Rushdie shares this fixation with connections, and never lets the opportunity to pass in this work of pointing out the similarities, repetitions and other linkages—both metaphorical and real—that figure so prominently in Midnight’s Children .
Even while admiring the imaginative riches of this bountiful novel, I couldn't repress the tedium caused by many of these lengthy digressions. Readers must navigate through an interminable account of the symbolic resonances of snakes and ladders, recurring speculations on noses and knees, and—worst of all— Rushdie drones on at length about the four kinds of connection between characters and historical events in his novel, namely, the passive-literal, the passive- metaphorical, the active-literal and the active- metaphorical. I would like to think that this digression was intended as a parody of bad literary criticism, but I suspect that Rushdie was merely, once again, exhibiting the "obsession with correspondences" described above. No, I did not clap my hands delightedly.
But if I dream of a revised Midnight’s Children , vastly improved by the excision of a hundred or so pages— ah, that would be the true masterpiece!—I also recognize that Rushdie is intentionally imparting a long-windedness to his magnum opus. His narrator often apologizes for his meandering accounts, and Rushdie invents the character of Padma, who is listening to the story as it is recounted, and constantly trying to keep Saleem on track and concise— hopelessly, because Rushdie has channeled this story through the voice of a storyteller who hates to come to the point. At times, Midnight’s Children even resembles Tristram Shandy , Laurence Sterne’s extended exercise in thwarting readers’ expectations about plot and pacing. As with Tristram Shandy , Midnight’s Children deliberately delays the birth of its main character for chapter after chapter after chapter, and takes a sardonic delight in not coming to the point.
Then again, I can hardly blame Saleem Sinai for not wanting to get on with a story in which so many things go badly for the narrator. Let others write about rags- to-riches, Rushdie prefers to tell us about riches-to- rags. Even Saleem’s face, body and internal organs take a severe beating during the course of these pages, and not all of his constituent parts survive to the end of the book. His hopes and dreams face equally daunting obstacles—but in a book in which the main character represents (metaphorically, literally, actively, passively) the fate of a nation during a time of turmoil, we should expect no less.
Saleem's destiny is also shared by those other children of midnight. Can their magic overcome the banalities, the crudities, the indiscretions, the corrupt failings that surround them? Or are the exigencies of history too powerful for even those who can transmute lead into gold, read minds, multiply fish, and travel through time? In the final analysis, Rushdie has achieved something fresh and original in this novel: he has crafted a magical realism in which ultimately the magic and the realism match up in confrontation— the fanciful and pragmatic go to war, so to speak—and that is a battle with, yes, meaning for India, but also with a few connections outside of Rushdie’s native land. I am happy to say that our author—in a rare concession—allows us to make some of those connections on our own.
Ted Gioia writes on music, books and popular culture. His most recent book is The Birth (and Death) of the Cool .