Midnight's Children

Midnight's Children is one of the most consecrated novels of the postwar era — a work repeatedly described as a watershed, and one whose influence was so pervasive that the decade following its publication was dubbed "post-Rushdie." Its status was ratified in a strikingly rare way when it was twice named the finest novel to have won the Booker Prize: once by a judges' panel at the prize's 25th anniversary, and again by a public vote at its 40th. Critics praise the novel's virtuosic, carnivalesque prose, its fusion of one man's life with his nation's, and its central conceit — a narrator born at the exact stroke of midnight on the night of Indian independence, whose existence is, in the author's own phrase, "handcuffed to history." The linguistic playfulness, the teeming cast, and the sheer narrative fertility are almost universally admired.

The same qualities make the book a demanding one, and critics converge on its difficulties almost as readily as its triumphs. The narrator's digressiveness is the most repeated complaint: he promises revelations and then defers them, circles back, and refuses to move in a straight line. The prose is dense — many readers describe the opening as an obstacle course — and the novel is not a fast read by anyone's account. There is also a strand of criticism, growing louder in the later sections, that the allegory is over-insistent: the one-to-one mapping of the protagonist's body onto the body of India is called powerful by some and heavy-handed by others, with several reviewers singling out the latter half's analogies as forced.

Thematic substance is where the book earns its gravity: it reckons with colonialism, partition, war, and state oppression, and uses the fates of the magically gifted "midnight's children" — those born in the first hour of independence — to chart what the nation's promise became and what was done to it. Where critics genuinely split is on how well the central conceit holds: whether the magical realism and the historical allegory enrich one another or crowd each other out, and whether the political pressure occasionally overwhelms the storytelling. Even the skeptics, though, tend to concede the book's power, and the consensus is unequivocal that this is one of the great English-language novels of its era.