Midnight's Children - an interim report

I thought I should post something about Midnight's Children, even though I still haven't finished it, because it is taking me a while to read. I know it isn't a long time for most people, but as I read at the speed of light, generally, and this is something of a plod, it feels very slow.

I mentioned to my friend Simon that Midnight's Children was my next project; he said that this is one of the few books that he's started and failed to finish. This filled me with dread, as we tend to like the same books, but I carry on regardless - I have a challenge to complete!

So - Salman Rushdie. Simon's difficulty in finishing this novel is entirely understandable. It was 100 pages before anything happened, and 200 pages before the main protaganist, Saleem, is born. Given that the first 200 pages is laden with future hints about his birth, this seems like a long time to spin out the anticipation. Once Saleem enters the picture, the pace speeds up a bit and this is where I started to get interested, but if I didn't have another compelling reason to finish it, I would have given up before then.

You can't argue with the quality of the writing. Rushdie plays with form, both in choice of words & in the punctuation & structure of sentences, to create mood and impact. There's a particularly striking scene, with the retelling of a dream about a witch killing children, where he does this to great effect; and another where the repetition of the colours saffron and green in every element of a description creates a sort of driving rhythm that supports the urgency of the situation (Saleem's birth), as well as linking it in with the birth of India as a nation. His description of Amina taking a knife to her verrucas is, unfortunately, particularly vivid...my feet are curling themselves up in self-defence just thinking about it.

There is an enormous amount covered in this novel. Indian independence, the political system, Partition...childhood events, accidents, turbulent family life, and of course the magical realism elements of Saleem's psychic links with India's other "midnight children". The novel is written self-consciously - Saleem is writing his own story, and frequently breaks off to comment to Padma, his companion. This obviously gives him the advantage of hindsight, and the ability to hint at future events, but from a stylistic point of view, I find it much harder to become absorbed in the story - I feel as though I'm sitting by the narrator, watching from a distance, rather than being one with the story.

This could also be partly due to spending almost four hours today reading whilst on a train to and from London at unsocial hours - much more difficult to get involved (particularly when the seat in front is occupied by someone playing a game on their iPhone without switching off the sound - grr - but I'll calm myself as this is not a forum for train rants!).

So far - hmm. This is an enormously accomplished book, it's very well constructed, and complex but easily followed. It's difficult to get truly involved in, in the sense of emotional engagement, because so much of its style and construction is about creating parallels between people & events of national significance. When Rushdie gets involved in the "real time" story that he's telling, it's immensely compelling, but this does tend to happen in fits and starts, and so many misfortunes fall upon Saleem, both physical and emotional, that it's difficult to see him as a three-dimensional character rather than a living metaphor. Maybe that's the point & I'm just not sophisticated enough to like it!

I suspect I will be glad I've read it, when I finish it, but I'm not quite near enough the end to feel that yet! More to follow- about 150 pages to go, I think...

Book #1

And just to demonstrate that I am doing something about this - first up is the Grapes of Wrath, mainly because we have it and so I can start straight away! Thoughts to follow...

The BBC's top 100 books

I don't know whether it's the start of the new decade, but this year seems to be the year of the list, with friends trying to achieve 52 in 52 (books or games, in as many weeks), or 101 in 1001 (tasks on a list, in 1001 days). I don't quite have the time or imagination to do either of these, so I've decided to set myself a task that I have already more than half completed - is this cheating? :-)

In February last year, the BBC published a list of the top 100 books to read before you die, reckoning that most people would have read 6 or 7 of them. At the time, I'd read 52, and so felt smug at being very well read. A year on, and I have only read two more, so have decided to publicly set myself the challenge of reading the rest. I'd like to say that I'll do it by the end of the year; not sure how realistic that is given that I have to go to work as well, and the Complete Works of Shakespeare are on the list (thankfully I've already read the Bible) but we'll see!

So, the list. As a starting point, the ones in red are the ones I've read, and I'll update them into blue as I read more. This is going to challenge me in overcoming my prejudices (I have tried time and again to read Dickens, and never enjoyed it, and I have never wanted to read Lord of the Rings) but hopefully give me a focus for reading - I read extensively and quite randomly, and generally not books of the highest quality!

1. Pride & Prejudice
2. The Lord of the Rings
3. Jane Eyre
4. Harry Potter series
5. To kill a mockingbird
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights
8. Nineteen Eighty-Four
9. His Dark Materials
10. Great Expectations
11. Little Women
12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles
13. Catch 22
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca
16. The Hobbit
17. Birdsong
18. The Catcher in the Rye
19. The Time Traveller's Wife
20. Middlemarch
21. Gone with the Wind
22. The Great Gatsby
23. Bleak House
24. War and Peace
25. The Hitch-hikers guide to the galaxy
26. Brideshead Revisited
27. Crime and Punishment
28. Grapes of Wrath
29. Alice in Wonderland
30. The Wind in the Willows
31. Anna Karenina
32. David Copperfield
33. The Chronicles of Narnia
34. Emma
35. Persuasion
36. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
37. The Kite Runner
38. Captain Corelli's Mandolin
39. Memoirs of a Geisha
40. Winnie the Pooh
41. Animal Farm
42. The Da Vinci Code
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney
45. The Woman in White
46. Anne of Green Gables
47. Far from the Madding Crowd
48. The Handmaid's Tale
49. Lord of the Flies
50. Atonement
51. Life of Pi
52. Dune
53. Cold Comfort Farm
54. Sense & Sensibility
55. A Suitable Boy
56. The Shadow of the Wind
57. A Tale of Two Cities
58. Brave New World
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
60. Love in the Time of Cholera
61. Of Mice & Men
62. Lolita
63. The Secret History
64. The Lovely Bones
65. Count of Monte Cristo
66. On the Road
67. Jude the Obscure
68. Bridget Jones' Diary
69. Midnight's Children
70. Moby Dick
71. Oliver Twist
72. Dracula
73. The Secret Garden
74. Notes from a Small Island
75. Ulysses
76. The Bell Jar
77. Swallows and Amazons
78. Germinal
79. Vanity Fair
80. Possession
81. A Christmas Carol
82. Cloud Atlas
83. The Colour Purple
84. The Remains of the Day
85. Madame Bovary
86. A Fine Balance
87. Charlotte's Web
88. The Five People You Meet in Heaven
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
90. The Faraway Tree Collection
91. Heart of Darkness
92. The Little Prince
93. The Wasp Factory
94. Watership Down
95. A Confederacy of Dunces
96. A Town Like Alice
97. The Three Musketeers
98. Hamlet
99. Charlie & the Chocolate Factory
100. Les Miserables