Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie

---

India, 1947.

Midnight’s Children won the Booker Prize in 1981, the Booker of Bookers in 1993 and the Best of the Bookers in 2008.

Historical fiction meets magical realism at the stroke of the midnight hour when India is free of British influence & colonialism after almost two hundred years. A thousand children born within the hour of independence have magical powers and are mysteriously connected with the land (and telepathically with the protagonist). This is the story of India told through the lives of these ‘first-citizens’. 

The children are born across the country and their stories are as diverse as the land; these kids and their lives are intertwined via the protagonist Saleem Sinai. Saleem is telepathic (like Professor Charles Xavier?) and at one point in the story where he loses his memory and finds himself serving in the Pakistani army - develops an incredible sense of smell. One child of midnight can teleport, another can change their gender. The children face the same questions that the country faces - they have choices to make, sides to choose but they can only look forward - they can know where they came from but they can never go back there. Like the children - India too cannot go back to what it was two centuries ago, and must navigate an uncertain future. 

Just like the children who must live in a newly independent but historical nation, India too lives in a new geo-political reality that has emerged after two world wars, the atomic age and the decline of traditional empires. Saleem and his ‘birthday twins’ lives run across metaphorical parallels with the nation's struggles - through milestones like wars and famines, and through tragedy, optimism, hope & despair.  

Like One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of Macondo through the Buendia family - Salman Rushdie narrates the story of independent India through Saleem Sinai. This is not a historical novel that speculates within the boundaries of fact; it is told through Saleem Sinai’s victories & failures, from a promising youth to brutal reality checks. 

These tenuous connections are only partly convincing, even in the magical realism genre - the subcontinent is too diverse for a unified narrative - even a fictional one like Midnight’s Children. The story is surreal and the writing tries to impress the reader rather than tell a story. Midnight’s Children is not your typical historical fiction, it's not even impressive magical realism.

Midnight’s Children is rich in prose and surrealism, but weak in plot. It's for readers who prefer the journey rather than a destination because the story doesn’t conclude where the book ends. Salman Rushdie’s writing style is more tell than show, which draws a certain type of reader who doesn’t mind forgiving a slower reading experience and plot holes. The idea of the lives of men and women metaphorically imitating the path of a nation was earlier explored in 1959 by Nobel Prize winning author and polymath Gunter Grass in his novel - The Tin Drum - the story of Oskar and post-WW1 Germany.