The Fantastic World of Midnight's Children

Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is a fascinating and beautifully written novel.  The narrator, Saleem Sinai, was born at midnight of August 15, 1947, at the very instant that India gained its independence from the United Kingdom.  Saleem sees his life as intimately bound up with the life of his mother country.  In fact, he sees his life as intimately bound up with the lives of everyone around him or even tangentially near him.  In the opening of the novel, as Saleem is racing to tell the story of his life, he says:   

And there are so many stories to tell, too many, such an excess of intertwined lives events miracles places rumors, so dense a commingling of the improbable and the mundane!  I have been a swallower of lives; and to know me, just the one of me, you’ll have to swallow the lot as well.

And Saleem delivers on that promise, presenting the reader with a stream of stories from the thirty years preceding his birth to the thirty years following his birth.

Saleem’s tale is a delicious combination of historical fact and magical fantasy, falling into the loose genre of magical realism.  On the one hand, the events surrounding Saleem are historical events.  We travel from Gandhi’s hunger strikes to India’s independence, from India’s war with China over the Himalayan boundary to its war with Pakistan, from the liberation of Bangladesh to the Indian Emergency under Indira Gandhi.  In many ways, the novel is an overview of the birth of India and it first tumultuous thirty years.  But Midnight’s Children is not an Indian Forrest Gump, in which Saleem reveals how he is central to all the important historical and cultural moments of Indian life.  While Saleem is indeed present for a lot of events, he is much more interested in the metaphorical connections between him and his country.  His sicknesses are India’s sicknesses and his triumphs and missteps match the country’s.  Because, on the other hand (to pick up my syntactical structure from long ago), Saleem’s adventures are as fantastic as they are historic.  Saleem, and all the other children born in the midnight hour of India’s Independence Day, has super powers.  Saleem can read minds while others are able to change their physical form, transmute metal into gold, travel through time, and so on.  Even when Saleem loses his psychic powers he has a super human sense of smell, smelling not only physical odors but the scents of fear, pride, sorrow and all the other emotions.  Even those without powers can affect the world in fantastic ways.  The women around Saleem infuse the food they cook and the clothes they make with their emotions, feeding and clothing others with envy, bitterness, and secret pain.  The effect of these departures from realism is magical and gripping.  Like the stories of other first-person narrators, Saleem’s stories are about more than their content and their facts.  Unlike other first-person narrators, Saleem’s reliability is not called into question—we aren’t trying to parse out what is real and what is not.  We are asked merely to consider the connections mapped out by Saleem between an individual and the world from which she has sprung.

Midnight’s Children is ambitious and funny, thoughtful and moving.  Like so many other beautiful novels, it effortlessly combines the high and the low, the intellect and the gut, making its reader laugh and think long after the last page has been read.