After reading the last few pages of Midnight's Children, I feel like I've just stumbled off a rollercoaster. Exhausted. Dizzy. Disorientated. Speechless. Wondering why I put myself through it. Proud that I made it through. And most of all, relieved that it's over!
That's not to say that I didn't enjoy it; I revel in a literary challenge once in a while. I have an awful habit of abandoning books that I'm not enjoying...first time round, I read a third of Midnight's Children before tossing it aside, which in a 647-page book, is a big investment. It's unusual for me to return to these abandonments, but I thought my recent experiences in India might make the book more interesting and easy-going this time round. Well, I was right about the first part at least...
Midnight's Children tells the story of Saleem Sinai, a boy born exactly at the stroke of midnight on August 15th, 1947: the exact moment that India was declared independent from Great Britain. From that moment on, the destinies of Saleem and India seem to be entwined, as the former tries to prove by telling us his life story. What's more, Saleem and five hundred other children, all born between midnight and 1am on that August evening, have consequently acquired supernatural powers, the dominance of which depends on how close they were born to midnight. As a result, Saleem, midnight-born, is one of the most powerful of 'Midnight's Children', along with a boy called Shiva, his biggest threat in every sense...
Saleem is a long-winded, self-obsessed narrator, whose tale thrashes and backtracks like a stormy sea. Sometimes it's frustrating to keep up with his thought processes, as he lets hindsight and impatience get the better of him. However, Rushdie brings him closer to the reader through the addition of Padma, his long-suffering girlfriend that reads and questions his life story as he writes. There's no doubt of Rushdie's incredibly vivid writing; you're not classed as the best Booker Prize winner in the accolade's first 25 years for nothing. Saleem's use of facial features to characterise his family and friends created truly startling images in my mind, as well as adding much needed comic relief throughout. It was also fascinating to discover a new side to Mumbai; as a rich child, Saleem experienced a very different sort of Mumbai to Shantaram's Lin, a convict-gangster. The reader is never sure of how much 'truth' Saleem is telling, of whether he is 'the chosen saviour of India' that he claims to be; even Saleem seems confused sometimes, as he goes from first-person to third-person within the same page. Despite his fluttering narrative, you still learn an incredible amount about India's culture and history from 1947 until the 1970s. Rushdie's ability to make political events relative to one boy's life is an incredible achievement...
It's been emotional, it's been difficult, but I'm glad that I gave Midnight's Child a second chance. If you love originality and are intrigued about India, give it a shot. It won't be easy, but then again, the best things in life never are! Challenging, surprising, and- even if it will take me a while to absorb it all- ultimately rewarding.
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