Midnight's Children

Did you know that Salman Rushdie was toying with the idea of calling his novel " Children of Midnight"? However, as a seasoned Ad man, he eventually came down on the side of the title with the best ring to it, and the rest is history.

A history book is partly what Midnight's Children is, although like no other history book you will have ever read. It is strange that so many of the people that I have spoken to about this book, have also remarked that they too have never read it, but don't really know why that should be. I picked it up with trepidation, but by page forty-four was completely seduced by the narrator's voice, and enjoying the caustic humour, and its particular Indian flavour.

Rushdie's narrator, one Saleem Sinai, born on August 15th 1947 on the stroke of midnight, at the precise instant of India's arrival at independence, declares at the outset that he has been "mysteriously handcuffed to history." He then proceeds to intertwine the history of his own family, starting with his maternal grandfather in Kashmir in 1915 with the birth pangs and subsequent tribulations of the new nations of India and Pakistan.
By day,  Saleem works in a pickle factory. By night he is driven to committing to paper the story of his life; paper that has taken on the unmistakeable whiff of chutney! The two are closely linked, both being a means of preserving: "Memory as well as fruit is being preserved from the corruption of clocks."

Nehru writes to the newborn: "We shall be watching over your life with the closest attention;it will be, in a sense, the mirror of our own." I too tried valiantly to watch over his life, but literally lost the plot.  By the time I was half-way through, I had ceased caring, although I skim read the last quarter, which upset me greatly. I really don't like to admit defeat, but Midnight's Children was too much for me. It was a completely over-stuffed naan bread of a book, intent on showcasing the author's genius, at the expense of this reader's patience! I didn't feel that I had the background knowledge of Indian and Pakistani culture,folklore, history and religion to get a true grasp on the subject matter.

Yes, it's a brilliant tour de force, and bitingly funny and inventive, but maybe Magic Realism is just not for me. I felt quite down about being beaten into submission by a book, but was somewhat heartened to discover, during a conversation with friends on a train last week, that two of them had also thrown in the towel on a previous outing with Rushdie's novel. They were now regretting the decision of their book group to choose Midnight's Children as their next subject for discussion. They have a month to read it, and boy are they going to need it!

I may have found the novel indigestible, but I still like chutney.