Midnight's Children
by Salman Rushdie
Summary
Saleem Sinai is born in Bombay at the exact stroke of midnight on 15 August 1947, the moment India becomes independent, and is therefore handcuffed to history. So are the thousand other children born in that first hour, each of whom has a gift, and the closer to midnight the greater the gift. Saleem's is telepathy, which lets him convene the rest of them inside his own head.
He is also, he tells you early, coming apart, and is writing this down in a pickle factory at speed before he crumbles, with a woman named Padma interrupting to complain that he is taking too long.
Around his family, over sixty years and three countries, Rushdie runs the whole history of the subcontinent: partition, the wars, the language riots, the fall of Dhaka, and above all the Emergency, which arrives in the last third and does something to the midnight children that the book has been dreading from the start.
It is enormous, digressive, punning, sentimental and exhausting on purpose. The prose almost never stops for breath. Readers who want economy will hate it. Readers who give in to it find the novel that made the modern Indian English novel possible, and one of the great comic performances in the language.
Give it a hundred pages before deciding, and do not attempt to hold every name. Best for readers who enjoyed One Hundred Years of Solitude and want its equivalent for the subcontinent, told by a narrator who will not stop talking.
Historical Context & Significance
Midnight's Children won the Booker Prize in 1981, Salman Rushdie's second novel, and it went on to win twice more in retrospect: the Booker of Bookers in 1993, marking the prize's twenty fifth anniversary, and the Best of the Booker in 2008, a public vote for the fortieth in which it took more than a third of the 7,801 ballots cast.
No other book has that record, and it reflects a genuine claim: the novel reset what English language fiction from South Asia could sound like, and the writers who followed have been measured against it ever since.
Indira Gandhi brought a libel action over a single sentence concerning her son, which was settled and the sentence removed. The far larger consequence of Rushdie's career came seven years later with The Satanic Verses.