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| Edition: | Random House Trade Paperbacks (Paperback) |
| Author: | Salman Rushdie |
| Published: | April 2006 |
| Pages: | 560 |
| ISBN 10: | 0812976533 |
| New: | $7.71 (70) |
| Used: | $2.95 (92) |
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Midnight's Children is a 1981 novel by Salman Rushdie. It centres on the author's native India and was acclaimed as a major milestone in postcolonial literature.
It won both the 1981 Booker Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for the same year. It was awarded the "Booker of Bookers" Prize and the best all-time prize winners in 1993 and 2008 to celebrate the Booker Prize 25th and 40th anniversary. Midnight's Children is also the only Indian novel on Time's list of the 100 best English-language novels since its founding in 1923.
Midnight's Children is a loose allegory for events in India both before and, primarily, after the independence and partition of India, which took place at midnight on 15 August 1947. The protagonist and narrator of the story is Saleem Sinai, a telepath with an extraordinary nose. The novel is divided into three books.
Book One
The first section details both the peculiar roots of the Sinai family and the earlier events leading up to India's Independence and Partition, connecting the two lines both literally and allegorically. Saleem is born at the exact moment that India becomes independent. From that point on, Saleem Sinai feels the pressure of his chronology and invests his life and narrative in describing the zeitgeist of his child- and adulthood.
Book Two
During his childhood, Saleem discovers that he, as well as all children born in India between 12 AM and 1 AM on August 15, 1947, are imbued with special powers. A significant portion of the plot details the attempt by Saleem to use his powers to convene the eponymous children. The convention, or Midnight Children's Conference, is in many ways reflective of the issues India faced in its early statehood concerning the cultural, linguistic, religious, and political differences faced by such a vastly diverse nation. Saleem acts as a telepathic conduit, bringing hundreds of geographically disparate children into contact while also attempting to discover the meaning of their shared miraculousness.
Saleem's Muslim family emigrates to Pakistan and back in the decades after the Partition, but during the Indian-Pakistan War Saleem simultaneously loses the majority of his family in an air raid.
Book Three
Saleem suffers an amnesia-inducing accident that lands him a curious position in the Pakistani army. Again, the strange trail of his life affect and are affected by the history of the Subcontinent as he participates in the 1971 war between East Pakistan and West Pakistan.
Saleem enters a quasi-mythological exile in the jungle of Sundarban, where he is re-endowed with his memory. He then returns to human settlements in Bangladesh, where he not only discovers old childhood friends from Bombay but also now slightly older Midnight Children. He accompanies one back to Delhi illegally, where, in failing to reconnect with the remnants of his biological family, he takes up residence (and a wife) in a ghetto of street performers and Communists. Meanwhile, Indian politics continues, and eventually reclaims him during the Indira Gandhi-proclaimed Emergency and her son Sanjay's "cleansing" of the Jama Masjid slum.
For a time Saleem is held as a political prisoner; these passages contain scathing criticisms of Indira Gandhi's overreach during the Emergency as well as what Rushdie seems to see as a personal lust for power bordering on godhood.
The Emergency signals the end of the potency of the Midnight Children, and there is little left for Saleem to do pick of the few pieces of his life he may still find and write the chronicle that encompasses both his personal history and that of his still-young nation; a chronicle written for his son, who is equally chained to history by birth but also possesses the potential for the miraculous.
