Summary | Author | Reviews | Discussion Questions


Midnight's Children
Salman Rushdie, 1981
560 pp.

In Brief

Booker Prize, 1981; Best of the Booker Prizes, 1993

Saleem Sinai is born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, the very moment of India’s independence. Greeted by fireworks displays, cheering crowds, and Prime Minister Nehru himself, Saleem grows up to learn the ominous consequences of this coincidence. His every act is mirrored and magnified in events that sway the course of national affairs; his health and well-being are inextricably bound to those of his nation; his life is inseparable, at times indistinguishable, from the history of his country. Perhaps most remarkable are the telepathic powers linking him with India’s 1,000 other “midnight’s children,” all born in that initial hour and endowed with magical gifts.
This novel is at once a fascinating family saga and an astonishing evocation of a vast land and its people–a brilliant incarnation of the universal human comedy. Twenty-five years after its publication, Midnight’s Children stands apart as both an epochal work of fiction and a brilliant performance by one of the great literary voices of our time. (From the publisher)

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About the Author

• Birth—June 19, 1947
• Where—Bombay, Maharashtra, India
• Education—M.A., King's College, Cambridge, UK
• Awards—Booker Prize, 1981 (named the best novel to win
   the Booker Prize in its first twenty-five years in 1993);
   Whitbread Prize, 1988 and 1995
• Currently—lives in New York, New York


For much of the 1980s, Salman Rushdie was the proverbial Invisible Man, in hiding from multimillion-dollar bounties on his head spurred by a fatwa from the Iranian Ayatollah for supposedly mocking the Islamic faith in his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses.

But try telling that to Richard A. Posner.

To the federal judge, author and scholar who used the number of citations in the media to rank the day's top 100 intellectuals, Rushdie was getting plenty of attention. The author, in seclusion somewhere, enjoyed the distinction of residing at No. 9 on Posner's list -- coming in ahead of fellow authors George Orwell (11) and Toni Morrison (13). Henry Kissinger, at No. 1, beat them all.

Despite the Ayatollah Khomeini's price on his head, Salman Rushdie was no Mr. Cellophane. In fact, it had the reverse effect. The novelist -- heralded in 1975 as a writer to watch with his first novel, Grimus, and a Booker Prize winner for his second book, the allegorical Midnight's Children -- had now broken through to the annals of popular culture trivia, becoming even, at one point, the punch line to a joke on the television sitcom Murphy Brown.

Indian-born but schooled in the United Kingdom, Rushdie remained a naturalized British citizen, though he has mined his past in India and Pakistan for the architecture of his novels. He explores big themes in his books and takes his characters on flights of fancy that have drawn comparisons to the magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquéz. Rushdie rejects such parallels, even though the main character in his 1995 novel, The Moor's Last Sigh spent only 4 ½ months in utero before birth and then aged twice as fast as everyone else. Rushdie told The Washington Post that was simply a metaphor for the quickening pace that life takes on as it progresses.

Midnight's Children is often heralded as Rushdie's masterwork. Returning to India, he examined its contemporary history by following the lives of the 1,001 fictional children born in the first hour of the country's independence from Great Britain on Aug. 15, 1947. Midnight's Children not only won the Booker Prize in 1981 but won the "Booker of Bookers" 12 years later, judged to be the best book that had won the annual honor in the Booker Prize's 25-year history. "I think this is the greatest compliment I have ever been paid as a writer," Rushdie said the night he won.

Rushdie's third and fourth novels, Shame and The Satanic Verses were both shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and The Village Voice said that they, combined with Midnight's Children, amounted to a triumphant series for Rushdie. "Let us call Rushdie's three novels of the 1980s -- Midnight's Children, Shame, and The Satanic Verses -- a trilogy, a vast, comic, morbid masterpiece of conceptual and architectural brilliance....", the newspaper said. "This book completes a trilogy that must be swallowed whole, python-style, hair, horns, and hooves intact."

The fatwa brought on by The Satanic Verses officially was lifted in September 1998, the same year that Midnight's Children was named No. 90 in the Modern Library's ranking of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. Unofficially, however, the bounties stayed intact. The writer Christopher Hitchens lamented in the Progressive that were it not for the death threats against him, Rushdie would surely be the world's Nobel laureate by now.

"He has raised a body of fiction that explores the world of the post-colonial multi-ethnic and the multi-identity exile or emigrant...," Hitchens wrote. "All of his works are designed to show that there is no mastery of language unless it is conceded that language is master."

But even as late as 1999, Rushdie remained a target: That year, a political organization in Iran had lined up more than 500 men to make a donation to bankroll an assassination plot against Rushdie. Their promised contribution? One kidney apiece.

Extras:
Rushdie was short-listed for The Literary Review's Bad Sex Award in 1995 for The Moor's Last Sigh, which included such verses as "For ever they sweated pepper ‘n' spices sweat."

Rushdie participated in a two-day, U.S. State Department conference entitled "Why Do They Hate Us?" for 50 diplomats in the wake of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., on Sept. 11, 2001.

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Critics Say. . .
This is a book to accept on its own terms. . . .As a Bombay book, which is to say, a big-city book, 'Midnight's Children is coarse, knowing, comfortable with Indian pop culture and, above all, aggressive. . . .The flow of the book rushes to its conclusion in counterpointed harmony: myths intact, history accounted for, and a remarkable character fully alive.
Clark Blaise - New York Times


Extraordinary . . . one of the most important [novels] to come out of the English-speaking world in this generation.”
The New York Review of Books

The literary map of India is about to be redrawn. . . . Midnight’s Children sounds like a continent finding its voice.”
The New York Times

In Salman Rushdie, India has produced a glittering novelist– one with startling imaginative and intellectual resources, a master of perpetual storytelling.”
The New Yorker

“A marvelous epic . . . Rushdie’s prose snaps into playback and flash-forward . . . stopping on images, vistas, and characters of unforgettable presence. Their range is as rich as India herself.”
Newsweek

Burgeons with life, with exuberance and fantasy . . . Rushdie is a writer of courage, impressive strength, and sheer stylistic brilliance.”
The Washington Post Book World

Pure story–an ebullient, wildly clowning, satirical, descriptively witty charge of energy.”
Chicago Sun-Times

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Book Club Discussion Questions
1. Midnight's Children is clearly a work of fiction; yet, like many modern novels, it is presented as an autobiography. How can we tell it isn't? What literary devices are employed to make its fictional status clear? And, bearing in mind the background of very real historical events, can "truth" and "fiction" always be told apart?

2. To what extent has the legacy of the British Empire, as presented in this novel, contributed to the turbulent character of Indian life?

3. Saleem sees himself and his family as a microcosm of what is happening to India. His own life seems so bound up with the fate of the country that he seems to have no existence as an individual; yet, he is a distinct person. How would you characterise Saleem as a human being, set apart from the novel's grand scheme? Does he have a personality?

4. "To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world ... do you wonder, then, that I was a heavy child?" (p. 109). Is it possible, within the limits of a novel, to "understand" a life?

5. At the very heart of Midnight's Children is an act of deception: Mary Pereira switches the birth-tags of the infants Saleem and Shiva. The ancestors of whom Saleem tells us at length are not his biological relations; and yet he continues to speak of them as his forebears. What effect does this have on you, the reader? How easy is it to absorb such a paradox?

6. "There is no escape from form" says Saleem (p. 226); and later, he speaks of his own "overpowering desire for form" (p. 317). Set against this is the chaos of Indian life which is described in such detail throughout the book. How is this coherence achieved? What role does mythology play in giving form to events in the novel?

7. "There is no magic on earth strong enough to wipe out the legacies of one's parents" (p. 402). Saleem is speaking here of an injury; but has he inherited anything more positive? Is there anything inherited which aids rather than hinders him?

8. Saleem's father says of Wee Willie Winkie, "That's a cheeky fellow; he goes too far." The Englishman Methwold disagrees: "The tradition of the fool, you know. Licensed to provoke and tease." (p. 102). The novel itself provokes and teases the reader a good deal. Did you feel yourself "provoked"? Does the above exchange shed any light on Rushdie's own plight since The Satanic Verses?

9. How much affection is there between fathers and sons in Midnight's Children? Why is Saleem so drawn to father-figures? What does he gain from his many adopted fathers?

10. "What is so precious to need all this writing-shiting?" asks Padma (p. 24). What is the value of it for Saleem?

11. "...is not Mother India, Bharat-Mata, commonly thought of as female?" asks Saleem; "And, as you know, there's no escape from her" (p. 404). Elsewhere he speaks of "...the long series of women who have bewitched and finally undone me good and proper" (p. 241). To what extent are women "held for blame" for Saleem's misfortunes?

12. Saleem often appears to be an unreliable narrator, mixing up dates and hazarding details of events he never witnessed. He also draws attention to his own telling of the story: "Like an incompetent puppeteer, I reveal the hands holding the strings..." (p. 65). How much faith do you put in his version of events?

13. Saleem pleads, "...believe that I am falling apart." (p. 37); he never arrives at a certain image of himself without being thrown into chaos again (e.g. p.164-165). But a child on an advertising hoarding is described as "flattened by certitude" (p. 153). Is there, then, value in uncertainty? What is it?

14. With the birth of Saleem's giant-eared son, history seems about to repeat itself; but Saleem senses that this time round, things will be different. How have circumstances changed?

15. Midnight's Children is a novel about India, and attempts to map the modern Indian mind, with all its contradictions. In your discussions, how much difficulty have you had in addressing the novel from a Western perspective? Is there an 'otherness' which makes it hard to assimilate, or are the novel's concerns universal and easily understood?