Midnight's Children

⚖The case for it

A doctor examines his future wife through a hole cut in a bedsheet, one patch of her at a time, and the whole novel lives in that image: "a nation introduced through keyholes." Saleem narrates from a pickle factory, filing his chapters as "twenty-six pickle-jars, namely chapters, of specially blended ingredients," memory as preserve. What makes it work is the braiding of one family's biography into Partition and everything after, so history arrives as lived incident rather than exposition. The narrator interrupts and corrects himself constantly, which amounts to an argument that no single version of a country's story is honest. The sentences survive sampling: "randomly poke a pin at any sentence in the book," one reader suggests.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

Nearly a third of the book passes before the narrator is born, grandparents and parents first, and that wait is where readers quit. The voice admirers call virtuosic reads to others as "the most pretentious thing I've ever read," a grandstander who casts himself as the center of a nation and interrupts every paragraph to say so. "No consideration for linearity or chronicity or the reader's sanity," one complains, another describing the effect as "having my brain inside a centrifuge." Women fare badly, with reviewers flagging "crass sexualisation, and careless violence towards women." The magical children who supply the title get introduced and then underused. And the Booker garland breeds backlash, a book "to be name-checked rather than really engaged with."

— the honest librarian

12h

honest hours

17

sittings