Reviewers hailed Midnight's Children as a stylistic tour de force and many studies have focused on Rushdie's technical virtuosity and originality.

Rushdie is indeed not afraid to dazzle his readers with a rich excess. Some of the episodes of the novel are operatic in texture or have a dreamlike quality; still others use the form of the newsflash and newspaper report for startling effects. Rushdie is fond of juxtapositions, digressions, flashbacks, flash-forwards, and breathtaking changes of pace; but he can also offer pages of straightforward narrative and sections which are constructed with journalistic particularity or essayistic clarity. On occasion the narrator appears self-conscious, self-reflexive, and postmodern in his bid to convince readers of the fictionality of his work; at other times he sprinkles his narrative with Indian names and words and colloquialisms to give the feel of the Indian milieu in which his characters move. Midnight's Children can...