Midnight's Children

Midnight's Children is Salman Rushdie's 1981 second novel, the Booker Prize winner of 1981, the Booker of Bookers winner of 1993, and the Best of the Booker winner of 2008. The structural premise is Saleem Sinai, born at the exact stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947 - the precise moment of Indian independence from British rule. Saleem and the approximately one thousand other Indian children born within the hour of midnight on independence day are gifted with various supernatural abilities; Saleem's gift is telepathy that lets him hold a long-distance conference of all the midnight's children across India. The novel runs Saleem's first-person narration across the next three decades of his life and the parallel post-independence Indian political-and-historical arc (Partition, the Indo-Pakistan War of 1971, the Emergency of 1975-77 under Indira Gandhi).

Rushdie's structural method is the patient maximalist magical-realist first-person construction that established the broader Indian-Anglophone literary-fiction market for the subsequent generation (Arundhati Roy, Vikram Seth, Aravind Adiga, Jhumpa Lahiri, the broader post-Rushdie Indian-English literary tradition). The Methwold-and-Sinai-family chapters across the front of the novel are some of the strongest contemporary post-colonial Indian literary prose about a specific kind of Bombay-Anglo-Indian-elite household. The Padma framing device (Padma is Saleem's contemporary listener at the Bombay pickle factory who responds to and interrupts the narrative across the entire book) is the structural conceit that lets Rushdie organize the maximalist-fragmented narrative into the patient sustained-narration novel the broader project requires. The 1975 Emergency chapters in the back third earn the structural moral payoff the entire novel has been preparing for.

Recommended as required contemporary post-colonial Indian literary fiction reading, as the structural Rushdie masterwork, and for fans of The God of Small Things (Arundhati Roy), A Suitable Boy (Vikram Seth), and the broader contemporary Indian-English literary tradition. The 2012 Deepa Mehta film adaptation extended the readership. The Lyndam Gregory audiobook is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.