I’ve had Midnight’s Children on my reading backlog for a year now and finally got around to it this month. My boss was making a visit to Tokyo and I thought it might be good to be able to talk about his home country. Up until then, the only book about India I had read was Shantaram by Gregory Roberts and I’d already chatted a little bit with him about that one. With the Covid-19 pandemic, his visit was cancelled, and the book remained on my shelf until a couple of weeks ago.
I really enjoyed reading Shantaram a few years ago. I thought the book provided a vivid description of Bombay’s bustling city from an outsider’s perspective and acted as much as a travelogue as an exciting adventure story. So I did wonder if Rushdie’s novel, the recipient of multiple awards and acclamations, was going to live up to my expectations.
Midnight’s Children is a story of India’s history told by one of its own natives. Saleem tells his family’s story in three books starting over a hundred years ago with his grandfather in Kashmir, continuing on to Bombay with his parents, and moving to his own experiences in Pakistan and New Deli. His family’s fortunes are intertwined with India’s own history. As it was a history that I didn’t really know much about, I didn’t know what to expect.
It’s hard to pin down one thing to describe what the book is about. The Midnight’s Children themselves are seldom referenced and Saleem only appears about halfway through the 600-page family saga. If I had to describe it to someone else, I would say that it’s a parable on how history shapes each generation as much as each generation shapes history. Towards the end of the book, Saleem describes himself as having surrendered his will to the “joint tyrannies of family and fate” but throughout the story he also blames himself for many events that seem completely outside of his control.
Midnight’s Children is a more than interesting read and I would recommend it. I took the unusual step of taking my own notes in the column and underlining sentences that I liked for whatever reason. By the end, there were many excellently crafted phrases that earned my own decorative scribblings. I’ve also recently found myself in need of a story with a likable protagonist and Saleem provided me with a good source of amusement. He managed to elicit a chuckle from me on more than a few occasions.
If I had one criticism, it would be the transitionary steps between each of the three books. The sudden jumps to new locations with new characters took me a chapter or so to get back on track. It’s probably a personal thing though as I can get attached to places and people if I spend more than a few hundred pages with them.
