Review

I have no idea what to expect. That was the prevailing sentiment I had prior to picking up Midnight’s Children and, surprisingly, it lasted up until the very last page. I chose to read this novel because it was unlike the standard tomes staring back at me from my bookshelf. I was ready for a new perspective and the subject matter, India’s independence, was unfamiliar territory. I hoped to catch a glimpse of a culture that has always seemed glaringly foreign to my scope of experience. Even the title, Midnight’s Children, had a romantic allure that seemed full of poetical promise of a new generation, meditative musings, possibly a twilight sequence. This is going to be great, I told myself, I have no idea what to expect.

            The opening sequence with Aadem Sinai in the Kashmir Valley and the introduction of the perforated sheet was sublime. It was undoubtedly the highlight of the novel for me. Kashmir felt like such a mythical, almost holy, place and the characters I encountered, Aadem, Tai, Ghani and his daughter, were fascinating individuals brimming with back-stories and future journeys that I was bracing myself to read. Unfortunately, this was the back-story and I, as the reader, would not stay in Kashmir for long. But because of the beauty and tranquility of that initial sequence, I maintained hope that the characters would at some point return to that serene valley. In the meantime, however, I was entreated to a narrative that became increasingly haphazard as the novel went on.

            The concept of the novel, we’re reading a story about a man writing a story and therefore we are reading that story as well, has the potential to provide an interesting perspective in comparison to your standard, run of the mill, omniscient narrator novels or even the first person, stream of consciousness narration. Yet in the case of Saleem Sinai, this mode is downright frustrating. If there were a competition in beating around the bush, Saleem would have the competition beat (please forgive the pun) The way in which he insists on the importance of an event over and over (e.g. the incident in the washing chest, Shiva, the Widow, etc) and still fails to describe the event had me ready to hurl his story across the room or, taking a queue from Padma, just walk away. Why didn’t I? Well for a large portion of the novel there was a promise of “magical realism” lingering in the back of my mind, more specifically, I was hoping that the grandeur of the titular children, the MCC, would come to a head and dazzle me the way I wanted to be, and after reading chapter upon chapter of Saleem’s rants, deserved to be dazzled. Here again, I had no idea that this promise would remain unfulfilled and that the MCC would “end before it even began” as one member prophesized.

            Perhaps Saleem’s rants would not have seemed so arduous had it not been for the bevy of characters presented who were so thoroughly cloying and so far from redeemable that I cared very little for their fates. That is not to say that I didn’t give them a chance – I wanted to believe that Amina would remain faithful, or that Ahmed would sober up and finally rewrite the Quaran, or even that Saleem would grow up and maturely utilize the gift he had been given (in this case, I was telling myself that the ramblings of his narration were simply brought on by the spectre of death looming) Nevertheless these characters seemed to shirk every possible chance they had to redeem themselves to the point where, when the house caved in or when they were about to fall into six million pieces, I simply shrugged and said “good riddance”. (the one exception here would be Aadem’s revelation that he had “found God” and subsequent flight into certain death –I was not ready to let him go and his seeming descent into madness was hard to read)

            One appreciable fact of the novel for me was the correlation of Indian history with the fictitious lives of the characters. I learned about a fair number of historical events which occurred in India in the 20^th century thanks to either their description in the novel or their reference to which I went and read with interest. Although it helps that I knew next to nothing about this time period and someone who isn’t a complete neophyte to this period would probably be familiar with these facts, I was happy to learn about them in this context.

            So, is this a “good” book? I am told that it is but you’d be hard pressed to find me in that chorus. I do not have a taste for magical realism (or postcolonial literature), even when used in such a disappointingly clever way. And although I am still intrigued by the faraway enchantment of Indian culture I think I’ll leave my pickled chutney in the cabinet for the winter because although I have no idea what to expect, at this point, I just do not care.