I sit and stare at this book and I have the same mental block toward writing a review on it as I do when approaching a task at my real job. There is a certain consternation that comes with managing something that seems, at first, unmanageable. There is a hesitancy to belaboring the obvious, even when that may be what is called for. It’s difficult to call a spade a spade when what you’re actually looking at is a shovel. I took my time reading this book, hoping to adsorb every little nugget of insight and relevancy that the book could dish out. Suddenly, I realized I dug so deep, I couldn’t climb out of the hole I made. So, as I sit in my hole and wonder about my plight, let’s just go over what this book is about. Let’s see if we can float above the pit and fill it in with fresh dirt that will allow some thoughts to grow and blossom into something intelligible.
Midnight’s Children begins with the birth of Saleem Sinai. Saleem is born exactly at midnight on the eve of India’s independence from the colonial reigns of the British Empire. Since then, his fate is tied into the fortunes of his home country, which he blames on the occult tyrannies of those blandly saluting clocks. This statement, like most in the book, is brilliantly placed and relevant on many levels. In the course of Saleem’s life, there is plenty of blame, plenty of mysticism, lots of tyranny, lots of redundancy, plenty of saluting, and various machinations of playing with the concept of time. Every sentence in this book resonates with such relevancy that it would be impossible to continually break down the book in such a manner. Needless to say, Rushdie mastered word choice with this book.
The mixture of the “magical realism” (or what I like to call fantasy, something Mr. Rushdie and I disagree about, but I digress) to real world events is interwoven with a subtly that defies description. Saleem’s life is constantly barraged by magical happenstance that is shunned, ignored, or unacknowledged, yet has direct consequence and significance to the life of a budding nation.
Rushdie uses the titles of his unnumbered chapters in clever ways. Each title is laced with meaning and each chapter signifies its own little contained story while still being tied into the narrative as a whole. Each chapter’s relevance to the others is apparent in the results of his life’s ups and downs. Even though each chapter has its own subject, you can still detect traces of the other chapters within the confines of the narrative frame.
The Perforated Sheet is one of the more profound images I’ve ever read. It represents the falsity of vision, the perfidy of modesty, the denial of knowledge, the fractured picture, the pinnacle of dis-information, yet it also protects what shouldn’t be seen, reduces painful revelation, entices exploration, and provides fuel for ambition. This extended explanation of how Saleem’s grandparents met is one of the most beautiful and sublime moments in literature. Yet, it’s also devastating how the revelation, and all the magic in the world, logically, doesn’t lead to happily ever after.
I could continue with these examples, but I think the point has been made. Even though this book came out in 1981, it still seems very relevant today, and, in Rushdie’s own words, that is the real prize that a writer can strive for, longevity.
If you’re not a fan of magical realism and heavy metaphorical allusions, this book may not be for you. If you’re not of fan of Rushdie’s essays or life choices, and choose not to read this because of them, you may want to re-evaluate that decision. Because I think you’re truly missing out on something really special.
