A long read

I have tried to read Midnight’s Children before and given up, overwhelmed by its brilliance and its chaos. That was after it won the Booker Prize and before the fatwa declared against the author, Salman Rushdie, in 1989.
 
Midnight’s Children is set in India during Independence and Partition. The main character, Saleem Sinai, is born at midnight, at exactly the moment when India becomes independent, in 1947. His life and the lives of the 1000 other Midnight Children born at that time become fantastically linked with subsequent events. Do they indeed help to create those events? The writing is extraordinary - a chaotic, fantastical kaleidoscope of words and images. One reviewer described it as ‘A swirling, overloaded mass of words, colours, smells, allusions and illusions…’.
 
I’m determined to finish Midnight’s Children this time, though it’s slow going. It is however made much easier by reading it as an ebook with the invaluable ‘search’ function. I use that often to look up the history, or remind myself of one of the mass of characters or to look up an unfamiliar word. No wonder it’s slow progress.