Midnight's Children

The book is built to digress, and most of its digressions are its argument: Saleem cannot tell one life without swallowing his grandfather’s nose, the perforated sheet, the silver spittoon and Methwold’s hairpiece, because his claim is that the life is made of them. Much passes the subtractive test. The perforated sheet, a woman known only in pieces, returns as the narrator’s whole method; the babies switched at Narlikar’s home carry the book’s question of who inherits. What holds the figure here, the lowest of the twelve, is that a hostile cut finds slack. Book Two’s long Bombay middle repeats its comic routines; the Pakistan years and the Brass Monkey’s turn into Jamila Singer run longer than they earn; the Sundarbans, though strong, is a stretch the argument permits rather than compels; and the teller’s anticipations are repeated past need. The cap is cleared with little to spare.

Score: 7.9 / 10

What the book brings into the open can be stated, and it holds: a nation founded at a stroke of the clock is a collective fiction which every citizen must carry as private biography, and the promise of 1947 was broken by the state that inherited it. The Midnight’s Children Conference, the one thousand and one children born in the first hour of independence, gathers in Saleem’s head as a parliament of gifts and quarrels, and is destroyed by the Widow’s sterilisations in the Emergency: the regime made war on the plurality the nation was founded to hold. As durable is the second finding, that memory and history are made, not recovered: “the chutnification of history”. Held where it is because the national allegory is at times schematic, Saleem’s body doing what a diagram would do, and the inner lives of Amina, Padma and Parvati are disclosed less fully than the condition they illustrate.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Elevation comes chiefly as comic transport, and it comes often: the grandfather’s nose striking the frozen earth of Kashmir on a spring morning in 1915; the opening, which starts toward “once upon a time” and swerves to the date and the clock; the midnight birth under the nation’s fireworks; the Widow’s hand in the dream, green and black, plucking children. The darker heights are real: the soldiers lost in the Sundarbans, in a jungle that answers their crimes with visions; the bombing of the family in 1965 and the silver spittoon falling on Saleem’s head; the closing vision of the crowd, a whirlpool of multitudes that annihilates. Held here because the register is so continuously heightened that the heights flatten into a plateau of brilliance, and the book rarely reaches the stillness or the terror of Blood Meridian or of the deaths in Anna Karenina.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Myth here is built, not hung. Two children are switched at birth, the rich man’s son raised poor and the poor man’s raised rich: Saleem and Shiva, preserver and destroyer, a pairing the names make load-bearing, which drives the plot and closes it when Shiva fathers the child Saleem raises. Saleem is Ganesh, the elephant-nosed scribe of the epic, dictating to Padma, the lotus goddess; the frame of teller and listener is the frame of the Mahabharata’s making. The thousand and one children carry the number of the Nights and Scheherazade’s condition, a teller narrating against death. The Widow is a demon-goddess and a prime minister at once. Held below the top because the myths are often signalled by the narrator rather than found by the reader, and the national allegory, the book’s own myth, at times hardens into equation.

Score: 8.8 / 10

The inheritance was the novel of India in English: Forster’s India seen from outside, Narayan’s and Anand’s realist provinces seen from within. The swerve is to take English and Bombay it: Hindi and Urdu syntax, film song, street speech and the oral teller’s rhythm made the medium of a national epic. The stake was real, a young author’s second novel wagered on a manner its first critics could have called pastiche. Charged against it, the book stands on proven paths: The Tin Drum, a narrator of abnormal body bound to his nation’s history and telling from confinement; Tristram Shandy, the birth deferred and the digressive teller; One Hundred Years of Solitude, the marvellous as the record of a nation. The turn is in the combination and in the transfer of the method to the subcontinent, not in the method, and the gate is cleared by a tenth.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Substitute a third person chronicle and the book loses its knowledge. The form is a man cracking apart who tells his life against time to a listener who wants to know what happened next, so that the novel’s content, history as something a person makes and gets wrong, is enacted by its telling. Saleem’s errors belong to the form: he notices that he has placed Gandhi’s assassination on the wrong date, and lets it stand, because in his India it happened then. The pickling of the chapters into jars is the form named: preservation that alters what it preserves. Padma’s interruptions make the reader a listener and the book a performance. Held off the top because the frame is sometimes worked harder than it needs, and in the later chapters the allegory, rather than the form, carries some of the knowledge.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Evidence, not promise: forty five years of return, in reviews, schools, universities and the whole field of postcolonial study, have not exhausted it. It has been read as national allegory, as postmodern historiography, as a comedy of the body, as a book of the Emergency, of Partition and of Bombay as a city, and as a study of a narrator’s reliability; it has been set beside Grass, García Márquez, Sterne and the Mahabharata, and each comparison finds more. Formally, the jars, the perforated sheet and the numbers repay rereading. Held here because much of the return circles the same few questions, nation, hybridity and history as fiction, and because the allegory, once seen, tends to tell a returning reader what each episode is for. The well is deep, and its walls show.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The field is the novel in English of the late twentieth century. The intrinsic force is large: the book moved the Indian novel in English from a minor province of English letters to one of its centres, by showing that English could be written from inside the subcontinent’s languages and that the novel of a nation could be comic, epic and marvellous at once. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the generation that followed wrote in the room it opened, Amitav Ghosh, Vikram Seth, who wrote against its manner, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, Kiran Desai and Rohinton Mistry in their different ways, and beyond India Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and the British fiction of migration; the academy of the 1980s and 1990s defined the postcolonial novel largely around it. Discounted: its reach was partly a reach of manner, often imitated thinly, and its methods came from Grass and García Márquez.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Forty five years since publication, on the step for thirty five to forty seven years, and a tenth above that step for the widest presence. The presence is as wide as that of any novel of its decade in English: in print without a break, taught across the English-speaking world and in India, translated widely, given the Booker Prize in 1981 and named the best of the Booker winners twice, in 1993 and 2008, adapted for the stage by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2003 and for the screen by Deepa Mehta in 2012. Presence earns the tenth and no more. The surface fixed to its moment is a real charge, the Emergency as a near-present grievance and references that need notes for a reader born after 1980; but the book has already outlived the regime it attacked and the readers who lived under it.

Score: 8.7 / 10

The prose is a commanded instrument: long sentences that run on a Hindi and English rhythm and break into lists; chapter openings that strike like a teller’s hook; leitmotifs, the perforated sheet, the spittoon, the nose, the knees, snakes and ladders, placed and returned with exact timing; comic set pieces built with stage precision, the Methwold estate sold with its contents, the washing chest in which the boy first hears the voices. The making is load-bearing: the voice is the argument. Charged on the same anchors as any medium: the manner is mannered, and its devices, the anticipations, the apostrophes to Padma, the hyphenated compounds, are used past freshness; and Book Three, after the Sundarbans, loosens into summary and allegory where Book One was close-worked scene.

Score: 8.7 / 10

One physics governs: the marvellous is admitted exactly where it carries the nation’s story, telepathy at midnight, the nose that smells, the witch’s basket of invisibility, and the comic and the atrocious obey one voice. Take the two most distant elements, the slapstick of the spittoon-hitting game in Agra and the massacres in Dacca in 1971: one narrator and one law, history entering the body, hold both. Narrowness is not the risk; the range is enormous. The strain comes late, when the allegory of Book Three overrides the law the first books set: the Widow’s sterilisation of the children works as plot rather than world, and Saleem’s amnesia as the buddha is a convenience of the frame as much as an event in it. The cracking of the narrator’s body is meant to excuse such strain, and partly does.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The orders held in one structure: three generations of a family; three nations, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, and two partitions; the state, its wars of 1947, 1965 and 1971, and its Emergency; Islam, Hinduism and Christianity, the last in Mary Pereira, the Catholic nursemaid who changes the babies; labour and class, from Methwold’s estate to the magicians’ ghetto and the pickle factory; the body, its nose, its sterilisation, its cracking; language and memory; the city of Bombay; the natural order as jungle and flood. They are integrated, not listed: each is pressed into one man’s body and one telling. Held below Anna Karenina’s 9.5 because the inner lives of others are held less fully than the public world; a tenth above Infinite Jest’s 9.1, because it holds a subcontinent’s history whole.

Score: 9.2 / 10