Objectivity? Funtoosh!

I’ve never been strongly attracted to Salman Rushdie’s books, so it was with more hope than enthusiasm that I picked up ‘Midnight’s Children’, the much lauded 1981 novel that put Rushdie on the map.  The novel deals in part with the history of India after independence.  I am a big fan of  Jhumpa Lahiri, Monica Ali, Vikram Seth, and Amit Ghosh, so it seemed logical to go back to early Rushdie, who in some ways paved the way for these writers.

‘Midnight’s Children’ was a challenge for me.  It’s not short.  I did get bogged down a few times and it took some willpower to get back to a steady reading rhythm.  I’m glad I finished it, but my feelings about the book are mixed.

The story tells the life story of an Indian man who was born at the exact moment when India became an independent country.  Rushdie has this character tell his own story in a fanciful and attractive way.  The style of narration borrows quite a bit from Dickens, but without the clear moral compass that is part of just about every Dickens work.  Rushdie’s use of language is fun and creative.  He includes many words from Hindi and Urdu, from slang Indian English, and he also just plain makes up words when it suits him.  No Queen’s English here, and the resulting informality is both charming and entertaining.  ‘Funtoosh’ is slang for ‘finished’ or ‘done’.  Rushdie here clears a path for Amit Ghosh, whose use of dialect is even more radical and fanciful. 

But language is not the only area where Rushdie denounces objective standards and objective truths.  Rushdie also implies that in history as well there can be no single standard or truth.  Instead multiple truths coexist and comingle in complex and confusing ways.  The lack of a simple truth may be the only simple truth.  There is room for a rich interplay between memory and fact, between perception and reality, so much room that objectivity itself becomes an old-fashioned and quaint concept.

That being said the vast sprawl of the plot is both the book’s strength and its weakness.  At times it’s the Pickwick Papers of the sub-continent: very entertaining, but sometimes incoherent.  If the defense is that coherence is in itself necessarily arbitrary and artificial, so be it, but this is clearly dangerous territory.  For me it did make for difficult reading at times.  Best to savor the myriad of wonderful details and trust that the larger picture will somehow take care of itself.  Trouble is that for me sometimes it just didn’t.  Probably my shortcoming.

While I know a little something about the history of modern India and Pakistan, I certainly don’t know more than the average educated American, and that puts me at a distinct disadvantage.  Rushdie’s intentionally distorted and sometimes satirical view of events is probably somewhat lost on someone who isn’t familiar with the details of the traditional textbook account of events.  I’m sure I missed the intended significance of many references and images.

Rushdie also relies on magical realism as a plot element.  He draws on techniques from novels like ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ to clearly differentiate the narrator’s tale from a more objective approach, and to fancifully connect the history of an individual with the history of a nation.  In this way the novel is very different from Vikram Seth’s ‘A Suitable Boy’, which is much longer but very traditional in plot and concept. I think I understand Rushdie’s approach in concept, but I’m not so drawn to reading it. Seems like he wants us to have it both ways: a view of real history, but one that makes up its own rules as it goes along.  Again, that’s in part the whole idea.

A movie version is set for release in early November of 2012.  Rushdie himself wrote the screenplay and does the voice-over narration.  Mixed reviews.

There’s considerable literary bravura and writer’s ego on display here.  Be prepared.  If you’re ready for lots of ‘godknowswhat’ and a view of the world that is ‘updownup’, go for it.  I’m a little dizzy after reading it.