Midnight’s Children,
by Salman Rushdie
How we worry about losing our love for language—texters and
their OMG, the use of u for you, broken grammar, misspellings, we seem to be
afloat in language sewage. We often
lament that writing just isn’t what it was in the golden ages of Edmund Spenser,
William Shakespeare or James Joyce.
But look at whose novel has just been made into a movie, who
was the screenwriter himself of that movie, and who earlier won The Best of the
Bookers for that novel, twice. If you’ve
ever read anything by Salman Rushdie, you know that well written literature is
still produced.
I will concede that the movie isn’t the biggest of box
office hits, and there are many who won’t be finishing this novel, but even so,
at least 87 editions of the book exist.
Those who do finish, and there are many, recognize this author is as
complex and brilliant as any writer in the English language, including Shakespeare.
Midnight’s Children
is a huge and complex allegory. To fully understand it, the reader would need
to be well versed in Hindu and Islamic theology (at the very least), British
Colonialism, the history of India/Pakistan/Bangladesh, majority and minority Indian cultural
mores, Greek mythology, umm, what
else… Knowledge about lime pickles and
the geography of Mumbai would come in handy.
But even without a full understanding of the book, any reader who
appreciates elegant writing will be dazzled.
Here he describes how an “Annie Oakley in toothbraces” establishes
herself as a bully among a group of bedazzled boys:
On and off the cheetah-seat,
Evie performed. One foot on the seat,
one leg stretched out behind her, she whirled around us; she built up speed and
then did a headstand on the seat! She
could straddle the front wheel, facing the rear, and work the pedals the wrong
way round… gravity was her slave, speed her element, and we knew that a power
had come among us, a witch on wheels, and the flowers of the hedgerows threw
her petals, the dust of the circus-ring stood up in clouds of ovation, because
the circus-ring had found its mistress, too:
it was the canvas beneath the brush of her whirling wheels.
The novel is narrated by a broken young man in a pickle factory,
as he tells his story, that is India’s
story, to a wife-like companion. He
tells his story complete with critiques of his own wording as well as her
reactions to his literary style:
(she)…prepares
my food on two blackened gas-rings, only interrupting my Anglepoise-lit writing
to expostulate, ‘You better get a move on or you’ll die before you get yourself
born.’ Fighting down the proper pride of
the successful storyteller, I attempt to educate her. ‘Things – even people –
have a way of leaking into each other,’ I explain, ‘like flavours when you
cook. Ilse Lubin’s suicide, for example,
leaked into old Aadam and sat there in a puddle until he saw God. Likewise,’ I intone earnestly, ‘the past
dripped into me…so we can’t ignore it…’
Her shrug, which does pleasantly wavy things to her chest, cuts me
off. ‘To me it’s a crazy way of telling
your life story,’ she cries, ‘if you can’t even get to where your father met
your mother.’
I’ll be moving on to
Rushdie’s Joseph Anton next, another
huge book, which I’m expecting to be as powerful. It frequently struck me while reading Midnight’s Children that just as his
narrator, Saleem, personally experiences the historical events of India,
Rushdie himself personally experienced Islam’s impact on the modern world.
As far as literature therapy goes, this one will convince
you that the English language continues to be written with as much depth,
humour, detail and meticulous polish as from any golden age.
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