Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie

This is the first book I've read by Rushdie & I have to say it's not at all what I expected. I'm not sure how I ended up with this expectation, but I really thought this was going to be a dry literary book that took me hours to get through but would be rewarding in the end (think all those Russian authors!) Isn't it funny how you can get an impression of an author without knowing any solid facts about their writing style or subject matter?

Anyway, Rushdie's writing is actually very funny & endearing. He paints an idiosyncratic picture, the story moving forward by a series of small events, never long passages of descriptive text, building up a vivid image of the setting by inference & suggestion. It's effortless reading in which you suddenly realise you've learnt so much without having to take anything in.

He builds up a picture of India amazingly, diving straight in but never excluding the western reader. He explains just enough of culture & language for you to be a part of his story without feeling like a tourist. Unlike some novels I've read set in foreign parts, you don't strain your inner eye trying to imagine the setting, you are simply there.

I am generally a fan of page turners, I like to be thrown from scene to scene & desperate to read just...one...more...page.... but this is one where you're along for the ride. I find myself reading it really slowly, but in a good way, enjoying every sentence. I was surprised when I realised how little I'd read in a week! It's very thick prose that gives you the impression of having eaten more than you actually had on your plate.

I'm a habitual book-highlighter so I thought I'd give extracts by just copying out what I've marked in. They're not extracts as such, some of them probably don't really make any sense but are just lovely turns of phrase, maybe they'll help you decide if you want to read it.

"They have turned their backs on us" Said the Convocation's posters "and now they claim we're standing behind them"

"How did Nadir Khan run across the night town without being noticed? I put it down to his being a bad poet, and as such, a born survivor"

"An insomniac cow, idly chewing a Red and White cigarette packet, strolled by a bundled street-sleeper, which meant he would wake in the morning, because a cow will ignore a sleeping man unless he's about to die. Then it nuzzles at him thoughtfully. Sacred cows eat anything."

"If everything is planned in advance, then we all have a meaning, and are spared the terror of knowing ourselves to be random, without a why; or else, of course, we might - as pessimists - give up right here and now, understanding the futility of thought decision action, since nothing we think makes any difference anyway; things will be as they will. Where, then, is optimism? In fate or in chaos?"

"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! 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."