Salman Rushdie is back in the news and on two accounts. Firstly, he has just published his memoir of living life under a barbaric, jihadist, ten year fatwa. Secondly, a movie of his award winning 1980’s masterpiece, Midnight’s Children is just about to be released. And now the confession: I had never read a single line of Rushdie’s work despite all the global attention his notorious Satanic Verses has attracted. It was time to make amends, but where to start? Obviously with his Midnight’s Children, and then work my way forward from there. And what a supreme treat that turned out to be.

Rushdie is indeed a master story teller worth every bit of literary praise that has been heaped on him. When I say a master, I mean in the same exalted company as say Chaucer, Shakespeare and Dickens. This man sure knows how to spin a yarn and keep his readers gripped till the very end. But Rushdie, is far more than just a master story teller. His Midnight’s Children is a work of history, of politics, of philosophy and of human psychology. It’s all that and more. Rushdie has produced a wickedly subversive novel and I can already see why the Mullahs and High Priests would rush to denounce his work.

I took the liberty of googling the book to see what the general consensus was. I discovered no shortage of reviews, many of which were concise and comprehensive, so there is no need to retread that ground. Instead I thought I’d pick out a few of my favourite passages in order to give a more personal take on the book. Needless to say, regular visitors to Sporting Polemics will be unsurprised at the selection with the emphasis on the deliciously dialectical. In fact the book is brimming with dialectics at every level; the personal, the political and of course the universal. Here is a gloriously fine example:

The moment I was old enough to play board games, I fell in love with Snakes and Ladders. O perfect balance of rewards and penalties! O seemingly random choices made by tumbling dice! Clambering up ladders, slithering down snakes. When, in my time of trial, my father challenged me to master the game of shatranji, I infuriated him by preferring to invite him, instead, to chance his fortune among the ladders and the nibbling snakes.

All games have morals; and the game of Snakes and Ladders captures, as no other activity can hope to do, the eternal truth that for every ladder you climb, a snake is waiting just around the corner; and for every snake a ladder will compensate. But it’s more than that; no mere carrot and stick affair; because implicit in the game is the unchanging twoness of things, the duality of up against down, good against evil; the solid rationality of ladders balances the occult sinuosities of the serpent; in the opposition of staircase and cobra we can see, metaphorically, all conceivable oppositions, Alpha against Omega, father against mother, but the game lacked one crucial dimension, that of ambiguity because as events are about to show, it is also possible to slither down a ladder and climb to triumph on the venom of a snake.’ P141

A finer exposition of the dialectic one is unlikely to find, and for this reason alone I would rate this novel amongst my all-time favourites. No wonder it won the Booker of Bookers, and not just once but twice! Rushdie keeps the snakes and ladders thing going throughout the novel and later on he muses, Climb a ladder (or even a staircase) and you find a snake awaiting you. Bob Dylan once expressed a similar sentiment when he snarled, ‘You’ll find out when you reached the top, you’re on the bottom’.

I mentioned earlier of the subversive nature of the book. That subversiveness literally oozes out of every page, out of every pore of every character, but there are some passages where Rushdie is quite explicit in this subversiveness, perhaps a sign of things to come in his Satanic Verses. As Saleem, the central character, reflects back on his teenage years, Rushdie has this to say:

Four years of nothing. Except growing into a teenager. Except watching my mother as she fell apart. Except observing the Monkey (Saleem’s Sister), who was a crucial year younger than me, fall under the insidious spell of that God-ridden country (Pakistan); the Monkey once so rebellious and wild, adopting expressions of demureness and submission which must, at first, have seemed false even to her; the Monkey, learning how to cook and keep house, how to buy spices at the market; the Monkey, making the final break with the legacy of her grandfather, by learning prayers in Arabic and saying them all at the prescribed times; the Monkey, revealing the streak of puritan fanaticism which she had hinted at when she asked for a nuns outfit; she, who spurned all offers of worldly love, was seduced by the love of that God who had been named after a carved idol in a pagan shrine built around a giant meteorite: Al-Lah, in the Qa’aba, the shrine of the great Black Stone. P292

Oh yes, how the religious fanatics would loath our Mr Rushdie. How they would be storing up their petty religious hatreds ready for a time when they could strike out with their deadly venom. And strike they did.

To say that Midnight’s Children is a magical fantasy running parallel to India’s ancient and contemporary history is to do Mr Rushdie a disservice. Rushdie’s intoxicating fantasy is so intertwined with India’s unfolding history that to say the two run parallel is quite simply wrong. One is a reflection of the other, a superb literary device that allows Rushdie to explore the historical and political dimensions of what was unfolding in a way that a simple history text, no matter how detailed, could never achieve. (In the same way that Steinbeck’s, ‘The Grapes of Wrath’, or Arthur Miller’s, ‘Death of a Salesman’ are a thousand times more powerful and more memorable that any number of dry history texts of the Great Depression.) If for nothing else, Midnight’s Children will be treasured as a brilliant historical account of India’s early years of Independence and partition. Here is one of my favourite passages:

And without any assistance from me, relations between India and Pakistan grew worse; entirely without my help, India conquered Goa the Portuguese pimple on the face of Mother India; I sat on the sidelines and played no part in the acquisition of large-scale US aid for Pakistan, nor was I to blame for Sino-India border skirmishes in the Aksai Chin region of Ladakh; the Indian census of 1961 revealed a literacy level of 23.7 percent, but I was not entered on its records. The untouchable problem remained acute; I did nothing to alleviate it. The status quo was preserved in India; in my life nothing changed either.’ P293

Great novels tend to operate on many levels. Truly great novels allow for different levels to intertwine seamlessly. Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is a magnificent example of this, for the most part uncontrived and unhurried.

Rushdie makes continual fleeting references to India’s communist movement, a political trend that has been all but airbrushed out of official Indian post-colonial histories. Then, when the reader is least expecting it, a sharp and perceptive account of communist divisions, but delivered in a manner that is entirely natural to the preceding narrative, a skill usually associated with the very best of Charles Dickens . Rushdie offers his readers this:

The problems of the magicians ghetto were the problems of the Communist movement in India; within the confines of the (magicians) colony could be found, in miniature, the many divisions and dissensions that racked the party in the countr . Picture Singh, I hasten to add, was above it all; the patriarch of the ghetto, he was the processor of an umbrella whose shade could restore harmony to the squabbling factions; but the disputes that were brought into the shelter of the snake-charmers umbrella were becoming more and more bitter, as the prestidigitators, the pullers of rabbits from hats, aligned themselves firmly behind Mr Dange’s Moscow line official CPI., which supported Mrs Ghandi throughout the emergency; the contortionists, however, began to lean more towards the left and the slanting intricacies of the Chinese orientated wing. Fire-eaters and sword-swallowers applauded the guerrilla tactics of the Naxalite movement; while mesmerists and walkers on hot coals espoused Namboodiripad’s manifesto (neither Muscovite nor Pikinese) and deplored the Naxalite violence. There were Trotskyist tendencies among card sharpers and even a Communism through the ballot box movement amongst the moderate members of the ventriloquist section.’ P399

That passage continues in fine style for some time further but in the interests of brevity I reluctantly draw it to a close. And then, without a hint of awkwardness, Rushdie returns us to Saleem’s personal narrative. From the general and factual to the fictional and personal as only a master story teller can do. Bravo Mr Rushdie, we salute your craftsmanship. Throughout the work there is a richness of language along with a perceptiveness of the human condition that makes every page a joy to savour. Next comes the Satanic Verses which, whatever its literary merits, has forever been overshadowed by other very contemporary agendas. I can’t wait.