Midnight's Children

Appropriately, I'm writing this just past midnight, having just finished Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, the night after Slumdog Millionaire won the Best Picture Oscar.  If "Slumdog" was your introduction to today's India - I'm just guessing, but I'd bet that's true for a lot of Americans - and you want to learn more about its people, history, culture and identity, Midnight's Children might be just the place to start.  You probably know Rushdie's name from the controversy caused by The Satanic Verses, the satiric novel that caused the Ayatollah Khomeni to issue a "fatwa" calling for the author's assassination.  (By the way, it's a brilliant, funny and moving book.)  Midnight's Children is the novel that made Rushdie a literary celebrity, winning the Booker Prize as the best novel in English in 1980, and subsequently the "Booker of Booker" Prize as the best novel in English since the Bookers were established.

Any description of the plot is a futile exercise, because Midnight's Children is one of those magnificent works of art that is totally unclassifiable - it's a sweeping epic, sharp satire, tragic romance; it's the story of one man, and of an entire country; it's funny, horrifying, fantastical and palpably real.  Rushdie reminds me of Robin William's stand-up style - the limitless scope of his references; the talent for identifying the precise, telling detail; the love of humanity in its infinite variety.  What Rushdie adds is passion, both for his country and its people in all their flawed beauty, and for the breathtaking ride that's the gift of the greatest storytellers.

Midnight's Children is the story of Saleem Sinai, born at the stroke of midnight as India achieved its independence, his life and destiny to be shared with India's own.  Saleem grows up as a wealthy Muslim in a Hindu nation, his life driven by a mystery regarding his birthright and the magical abilities of those children who share his birthday.  But Saleem is only the central figure in a story that begins decades before his birth.  The story of his family, beginning with his physician grandfather meeting his bride-to-be through a hole in a sheet, is intertwined with the history of independent India, including the end of the Raj, the birth of Pakistan, the rise and fall and rise of democracy, bloody wars and bloody peace.  

In fact, like Slumdog Millionaire, the real star of Midnight's Children is India itself, in all its contradictions, color, magnificence and blundering.