Midnight's Children

Midnight's Children
by Salman Rushdie
read: 2012
Time 100 Novels, Modern Library #90, Guardian 1000 Novels, James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Man Booker Prize

The one word that comes to mind when I think of Midnight's Children is "rich."  The novel is long and suffused with symbolism.  The prose is big and bold, and the narrator has a lot of personality.  The world is an imaginative interpretation of our own, with elements of "magic realism" poking out at the seams.  Themes and symbols appear and are repeated in patterns throughout the novel - religious symbolism, "nose and knees," jewelry, a center part, bodily functions, impotence, parents, etc.  Even though Midnight's Children is a long novel, there's little fat here; the book is intense, page after page.

But how do you analyze a book that gives away all of its secrets?  Saleem, Midnight's Children's narrator and protagonist, is born at the exact instant India acquires its independence, but as if the parallels between his life and that of his country are not obvious enough, Saleem as narrator interrupts the story halfway through to share with the reader four different ways this parallel works.  When Saleem introduces a new parental figure into the story, he explicitly calls it out and notes how it's just another in a long line.  One could write an a long, long book about all the symbols and parallels in here, but Rushdie takes all the work out of it.  But the transparency of the symbolism doesn't make the novel less interesting or less of an intellectual challenge.

The style is very rich and fun, with Saleem writing with a manic energy that gives the impression of a train about to run off the rails.  There's magic and humor and absurdity, but upon finishing Midnight's Children I came to realize that it is fundamentally a pessimistic book.  The story is a tragedy told in a comic style, which distracts you from the progressively more terrible things that are happening.  Is India, despite all its potential, all its fathers and mothers, all its natural beauty and greatness, all its diversity and spirit, ultimately doomed to collapse under the weight of its very worst elements?