Jun 01, 2010 06:00 PM
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I can say with all confidence that had I not been obliged to read it for a course, I would probably have lost my nerve somewhere in the first three pages. I was very soon thinking "My intellect is not equal to this text." However, as the book unfolds it starts to make a great deal more sense, and from a quite inexplicable start, goes on to tell an impressive tale.
The premise is this. The children born at midnight on the day of India's independance are all possesed of strange an unusual powers. The tale is narrated by Saleem Sinai, 31 at the time of writing and the first of the midnight's children. We follow his early life, and the history of his family, twined up with the history of an emerging country.(This will make next to no sense in places if you know nothing about India's history but stick with it.)
The plot of this novel is hard to explain, because its not about development in any linear way, its about people and their families, about a country and much of it is symbolic. There are many tales within the tales and it can make it all a touch hard to follow. Tehre are elements of lief in india that may seem exotic, incomprehensible to Western readers - it certainly goes a long way towards shattering the myth of there global village.
I would like to tell you about the powers of the children born at midnight, and about their fate, but these revelations would spoil the plot. Their fate is entwined with india's politics, their birth symbolic perhaps of the new hope and energy of the reborn India. Some are psychic, some too ebautiful to be looked at, some are warriors, others magicians. They are almost unreal, too amazing for the mundane world we know, too fragile to survive long.
A few concepts from the course then. Firstly, magical realism(other authors in this area,
Toni Morrison, Isabel Allende, Gabriel Garcia Marquez)this is the mixing of fantasy and reality, usually drawing on the traditional beliefs that have been stifled by colonialism. It can be very unsettling, but is exciting stuff.
Post Colonialsim - this is a genre as well. There's a lot of fiction about getting over having been a colonial country, and of the cultural mix that tends to result - England left a mark on India and Rushdie seems very conscious of this.
Finally, Chutney. There are reoccuring themes in the book about food preservation, culminating in Saleem's chutney industry. Thirty chapters, almost one for every year of the narroators life. A pickle for every year as well. Rushdie/Saleem is preserving history, capturing it, drying it, turning the living moment into something that can be saved. The book is terrible self conscious, referencing other peices of literature(especially English ones) and could be called "Meta-fiction" if you were into labels.
This book is like an onion, every time you remove a layer of emaning, there is another layer underneath waiting for you.(Ok, some sort of infinite onion then, probably waiting to be pickled.)
If you don't like long, slow moving texts with little obvious'plot' then avoid this book because you willd etest it. If you are fine with long ehavy novels, if you can read Victorian literature without flinching, then you are well equipped to give this one a go. It certainly isn't going to be everyone's cup of tea - a shame because the story is fantastic. I felt enormously pleased with myself just for managing to read it. I am going to recomend it, but not to anyone who only reads light paperbacks.
