[Because Midnight's Children relates] the progress of the political juggernaut through the Indian subcontinent—the juggernaut being literally a religious procession taken through the land in celebration, although said to leave behind a wake of destruction—one might expect a dark and somber treatise. It is nothing of the sort. On the contrary, Midnight's Children burgeons with life, with exuberance and fantasy. It has the same effect on the eyes and the ears as a magnificent circus performance—a scene that is brilliant with color, zest, dare-devilry and loud bravado. The language is as full and copious as a flood or fire of tremendous proportions. If Midnight's Children is sprawling and untidy, then it shares these characteristics with such natural phenomena. If there are many deaths and acts of destruction in the novel, then every death seems merely to fertilize the Indian soil so that 10 heads spring up in the place of the one that rolled. If the last third of the book reveals a slight dwindling of the creative spring, then this is a part of the great design, for by then Rushdie's hero claims to be "disconnected, unplugged, with only epitaphs left to write" and ends, resignedly: "New myths are needed; but that's none of my business."
Before ending on that elegiac note, Rushdie has painted a full portrait of "India, the new myth—a collective fiction in which anything is possible, a fable rivalled only by two other mighty fantasies: money and God." He uses the name India for the whole subcontinent and spans the recent history, both told and untold, of both India and Pakistan as well as the birth of Bangladesh. Yet one hesitates to call the novel "historical" for Rushdie believes—like Gunter Grass whose work is, one feels, the chief influence here …—that while individual history does not make sense unless seen against its national background, neither does national history make sense unless seen in the form of individual lives and histories. (pp. 1, 13)
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