Midnight’s Children/ Salman Rushdie

With Salman Rushdie winning the ‘Best of the Booker’ prize for Midnight’s Children on the occasion of the award’s 40th anniversary, we look back at reviews that greeted his novel when it first appeared in 1981.

Children of their time/Hilary Bailey/The Guardian

In England, Rushdie did not possibly generate a great deal of excitement, at least not enough for his book to garner an independent review in leading newspapers. Here, it is, in fact, clubbed together with six other works of ‘new fiction’, though it is the first to be discussed. Bailey describes the book as much more than a “political fable”, attributing the myth and the magic to Rushdie’s Oriental sensibility, where the protagonist Saleem Sinai is “not of his time” but “he actually is his time”.

Fiction Review/Elaine Feinstein/Times Literary Supplement

Another instance of the book being reviewed along with two other works of fiction. Though “monstrously rich”, Feinstein also felt the book to be “bewildering” and after a brief delineation of the path that the plot traverses, it is summarily dismissed as “witty as well as strange”, “with pungent dialogue as well as confusing superstitions”.

A novel of India’s coming of age/Clark Blaise/ The New York Times

American reviewers seem to have been infinitely more perceptive, locating in the novel a departure from E.M Forster’s vision of India, and instead “a hunger to swallow India whole and spit it out”. It is seen as a “novel of India’s growing up; from its special, gifted infancy to its very ordinary drained adulthood”. It notes Rushdie’s ease with the Indian pop culture, which “sounds like a continent finding its voice”. Most importantly, it describes the book as something to be accepted on its own terms and the author as one “to welcome into world company”.

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