Midnight’s Children
7/10. Good. Because my eyes have become specially attuned to picking out books published by The Modern Library, Penguin Classics, or Everyman’s Library.
Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is the story of Saleem Sinai, a boy who is born right after the stroke of midnight, in the first hour of India’s independence, granting him, and the 521 other children born within this hour magical powers. His is telepathy. The tale starts with his grandfather, and ends when he is around 30, settling down to write his memoirs, which is Midnight’s Children.
Midnight’s Children is a delightful piece of romantic realism, filled with unforgettable characters, snappy dialogue, hilarious mishaps, and historical relevance. Except I didn’t understand much of the historical relevance. Which not only made the book more difficult to understand, but also resulted in an underappreciation of its intricacies (I’d assume). I’ve learned a great deal of things about Indian culture and history over the past few months because I was working with many people of Indian descent, and many things came up in conversation. Unfortunately, I wasn’t prepared. I don’t see how someone who doesn’t have a grasp of Indian culture and history can appreciate this novel, which leads me to believe that this novel can be inaccessible. Despite this, I would still give it a positive rating, and recommend it to others (who I believe have a better grasp of India).
What I love about magical realism is that I don’t realize what it is until I’m in the middle of it. When it’s well written, it’ll string me along further and further from practical possibility, until I realize that I’ve left the real world and am somewhere in between. The events in Midnight’s Children get more and more fantastic until I’m not sure if it was family legend, an unreliable narrator, or childhood delusions that brought me to where I am. When I look back, I’m far from the real world.
American Gods introduces the fantasy world slowly, but once there, is fully there. Looking back, I think it may have been incorrect to identify it as magic realism. Just another classic story of a hero being called into his quest. Once Shadow is introduced to this world of gods, he stays there. There is a distinct ‘world-within-a-world’ where he resides in the same physical realm as we do, but now interacts mostly with magical beings, and meeting with mundane people is the exception. In Midnight’s Children, some unlikely events occur, but the magic is kept to a select few characters who are still very much bound by the limitations of our world.
Murakami’s works fall more closely in line with magical realism. They deal with inexplicable events set within the modern world with characters that are perfectly ordinary. The characters are often a little confused as the reader is, but the constraints of the real world are always there. Something that I do wish to note, is that with all the works that have been described by others to me as magical realism involve a great deal of sex. And not just regular sex, but what seems to be repressed sexual desires in the face of societal taboos. Murakami’s works are heavily charged with sexuality, and I would say the sex scenes are a part of the magical realism. Sex with children, sex with maternal figures, and magical sex. Midnight’s Children shares in this celebration of forbidden sex. Saleem nearly has sex with his aunt, his sister, and a 500 year-old prostitute, but never with the woman he ends up marrying. That might not have been particularly salient, but it was interesting. For me anyways.
However, Murakami is more surreal than real. Whenever something happens in a Murakami novel, I feel as though I was dreaming. I can see myself as that very real character, but in a dream. It feels like there are two worlds instead of one, but unlike American Gods, I haven’t left the real world. The protagonists slip back and forth from a world where the rules were like what they’ve always known, to a dream.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude follows in this tradition of a realistic place populated by seemingly ordinary people, only it turns out that many magical events follow them. And of course, frenzied sex, be it with sister, mother, or aunt. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, the magic happens quite matter-of-factly, whereas Saleem is a child when he is introduced to magic in Midnight’s Children, so he accepts it easily as well. This is another aspect of magical realism: the magic isn’t the centerpiece of the world created or the story told, but serves as a lubricant. It makes the story interesting, and helps broach topics that are difficult to discuss. Another point of similarity with Midnight’s Children is history playing in the background. I know even less Latin American history than I do Indian, but even then, I could tell that I was missing a lot of context.
Despite missing out on many central themes, both One Hundred Years of Solitude and Midnight’s Children still managed to communicate many important ideas. An understanding of history isn’t necessary to see the ill that railroad and foreigners bring to Macondo, or the incident with the banana plantation is representative of what happens in these banana republics. Likewise, Midnight’s Children makes it easy to see the results of family displacement and separation during tumultuous times. The diversity of India which causes conflict, as well as the negative influence of British colonial rule is apparent. Despite their magic, the characters go through real struggles.
Importantly however, magical realism makes for entertaining stories. The characters and events that befall them make Midnight’s Children a fantastic tale, with or without the serious history lessons. Offhand humour and flippant descriptions create an amusing tale with memorable characters and events. For example, young Saleem thinking that his father sought solace from a djinn (gin) in a bottle. Or this quote near the beginning of the novel, promising scandalous content: “Family history, of course, has its proper dietary laws. One is supposed to swallow and digest only the permitted parts of it, the halal portions of the past, drained of their redness, their blood. Unfortunately, this makes the stories less juicy; so I am about to become the first and only member of my family to flout the laws of halal. Letting no blood escape from the body of the tale, I arrive at the unspeakable part; and, undaunted, press on.”
However, I think the quote that best characterizes the novel is: “What’s real and what’s true aren’t necessarily the same.” Because Midnight’s Children does tell the story of an Indian family through the start of the 20th century to 30 years after partition. While individual experiences may differ, everyone faced the same set of hardships and themes. Towards the end of the novel, Saleem is living in a slum with a group of street performers, and the government comes to clear them out, presumably for new development. Some of the street performers start shouting that the government is there to sterilize them. As the reader, I thought that this was just a conspiracy nut. Until the government actually sterilizes Saleem. And then I do some research online, and I find out that there was an Indian politician who bulldozed a slum, and then initiated a compulsory sterilization program to limit population growth. Funny how I had an easier time believing that Saleem could read people’s minds than believing that the government would forcibly sterilize its people.
In the end, this month’s review also turned out to be a lot messier than I intended. I planned to use Midnight’s Children as a segue into my thoughts on romantic realism because I didn’t think I really grasped the novel. Then, as I wrote, I started getting more and more ideas. Alas, I started writing this a few days ago, and didn’t have time to change it. I refuse to push back the completion date. I don’t think I’d have the self-control to get back on track if I broke the habit of publishing once a month. I’ll leave with one more thought.
I originally wanted to include Martel’s Life of Pi in the discussion about magical realism, but left it out because I decided that it was irrelevant. Now, I’m reminded of what Pi says to the two Japanese salarymen at the end of the novel when asked about the veracity of his two stories, one fantastic tale of him surviving on the high seas with a tiger, and one horrific one of cannibalism. “So tell me, since it makes no factual difference to you and you can’t prove the question either way, which story do you prefer? Which is the better story, the story with animals or the story without animals?” The salarymen agree that the story with the animals is better. I would argue that a tale complete with magic, fable, and romance is also better than the alternative.
