I have finally finished Midnight's Children. It's been an interesting experience. Trying to plough through this book has made me challenge the way that I read, pretentious as that may sound. I think I've mentioned previously that I read really fast - my driver to find out what happens at the end means that I do miss details, and generally don't think that much about what I'm reading other than taking in the outline facts.
Midnight's Children was impossible to read in this way. I've already commented that nothing seems to happen for the first 200 pages and, another 150 pages on, I realised that nothing was going to happen going forwards, in the way that I was looking for it - i.e. significant events, in the present tense, which caused an unexpected change in the direction of the story. The narrative voice is so distant (despite the fact that he is telling his own story), and bound up in metaphor, that all events are just below the surface of the text - I'm struggling a little to put this into words - as a reader, you actually need to read and digest the metaphor, the very visual language, and the narrator's own uncertainty about the accuracy of his memory to get to the heart of the story.
It's a difficult book to read.
Rushdie plays with the reader's perceptions throughout. Saleem expresses doubt about the accuracy of his dates & memory, leading me to believe that the parallels between his life and the life of India as a nation are delusions of grandeur, entirely in his own mind, rather than the cause & effect that he believes. However, his arrest and subsequent events at the end of the book indicate that the group of children (obviously now adults) are seen as a significant threat - they clearly have some significance and relationship to the life of the nation beyond Saleem's own mind, leaving me then to revisit my previous perceptions. Having said that, belief in the events of the novel to any extent do involve a suspension of disbelief - but for some reason I find it easier to do this in relation to the magical powers of the children than in relation to national events. Perhaps a reflection of the individualist society we live in, perhaps a limit in my imagination - who knows?
I did also find the level of coincidence in the novel, putting lost friends & family in entirely random places to be found by Saleem, difficult to believe in. However, perhaps I'm being difficult to please here - I can't help but contrast this to the Grapes of Wrath, where I complained about the way that loose ends were not tied up, and people were never heard from again. Saleem ties up all loose ends in the narration of his story, sometimes convincingly, sometimes fantastically, and sometimes admitting that he doesn't know, and this is the way he likes to believe that it happened.
There is a passage which really stuck with me:
Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I've gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each 'I', every one of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude.
(p535 of the Vintage Books edition)
This is written in the context of his significance to the Indian nation (and gives a good example of the style of prose that I found so difficult to skim read), but I thought this was a great way of summarising an individual's impact on the world for those looking for their own significance...leaving questions of God and higher meaning to one side for the moment!
Having reached the end, I'm left with an appreciation of the complexity of this novel. I suspect that I might have got more out of it had I known more about the period of history it covers, or had I read the beginning with the same mindset as I read the end. However, I still feel that the metaphor is heavy handed...Rushdie wants to leave you with a particular interpretation of Saleem's significance, actions, and life, and therefore interprets this through the voice of the narrator. There is very little space or scope for a sense of discovery that comes with a subtler metaphor - I feel, rather, that I've been beaten about the head with what he wanted to say!
Would I read it again? I doubt it...but I'm glad I didn't give up this time.
Onto the next - I might go for Lord of the Rings or Nineteen Eighty-Four for something slightly gentler.
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