Salman Rushdie's, "Midnight's Children"

Charting India's turbulent history since its independence and telling it through a story is no small feat. Rushdie certainly achieves what he set out to do in that sense. Influences of precursors in the magical realism epic genre is very evident in Midnight's Children, I can't help but think of One Hundred Years of Solitude along with other lesser known works by Jorge Amado and Mario Vargas Llosa, but this is elite company to be aligned with and Rushdie certainly has taken the genre and made it his own. While I wholeheartedly embrace the ambitious novel, my feelings as a reader were somewhat mixed. I appreciate the abundant research that went into the novel, the intricate parallels drawn between the generations, the twins-- an allegory for Hindu/Muslim, India/Pak, India split between nationalism and the inherited British values and so forth, along with the allusions to mythical and cultural icons. The foreshadowing creates a restless anxiety about the turn of events that somehow to me seemed sour once they arrived. I enjoyed the adult characters more and the adolescent ties more than the central adolescent character, Saleem who wades through incredible tragedies and circumstances and accompanies the reader for much of the novel. The grown up Saleem shows up as the writer of the autobiography, the book itself, a clever jolt to break the relentlessness of the novel's historical narrative.

Rushdie conjures up as many tangents and detours as possible and willfully makes a mad dash for each. It's not that I didn't relish the panoramic view I saw but I wanted to explore the woods deeper. Perhaps if the central narrative voice wasn't such hopeless downer I might have enjoyed it even more. The first half of the book was breezy and enjoyable up to the part where India has the changing of the guards and the joint family busts at the seams squabbling like typically colorful fictional neurotics. But the part of the story that covers the Indo-Pak war was very drawn out and bitter. And the sudden infusion of incestuous longing seems forced and needless at this point. While One Hundred Years referenced the horror of the central american governments, Midnight makes overt references to Indian politics and politicians that somehow doesn't jell well in a novel. Morarji's urine drinking and Indira's emrgency rule must've really got Rushdie's goat, both issues get equal importance and numerous mentions in the novel. There seems to be an underlying sarcasm, a kind of a holier than thou snickering at the miseries and superstitions of India, something I abhor in many Indian expatriates, something which I could have easily done without from Rushdie (I hate V.S.Naipal for this reason). In a subject as rich and varied as India, I was disappointed that Rushdie couldn't find more to celebrate.