completed .. ..

Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro (London, 2005)

This is a story from the author’s imagination. The creepy thing about it is : it might just have been true.

I’m not going to say anything about the plot because even a few hints here and there could spoil the suspense for future readers. All I will say is that this novel, this first person narrative covering the first thirty-one years of a woman’s life, has something of the air of science fiction about it. It is a story conveyed so well, a story threaded through with uncertainties and possibilities, it just might have been. It just might.

© francis cameron
oxford, 4 march 2009

midnight's 3 levels of perception

This is my 9th consecutive month with Books on the Broad.
· now our title is Midnight's Children
· written by SALMAN RUSHDIE
· originally published in 1981
· by Jonathan Cape

introduction

This is splendid story-telling : a vast narrative of epic proportions. There is enough material here to justify a full scale doctoral dissertation. I do not propose to go that far. Instead, I offer just three perspectives : 3 levels of perception.

1st perception : everyday reality

This is the story told by Saleem Sinai, born in Bombay at the stroke of midnight on August 15th 1947, that same terrible midnight which sounded the final knell of British rule in India; and the consequences which followed. It is a gargantuan subject, a dimension well-matched by the expansiveness of the telling and the writing.
The conversations are so convincing, so realistic. I feel myself right there, ever-present among the listeners.
The descriptions have something special about them. They conjure up the crowded alleyways, the hustle and bustle of children at play, the menacing forests of the Sundarbans, the comfortable squalor of the magicians' ghetto.
Rushdie does not spare the strokes of his pen. Objects are often viewed from several different angles. Full attention to the nose on a man's face occupies most of a page and then spills over onto the next. That nose is so important to the story. It's a constantly recurring theme, a persistent leitmotif.
I find myself comfortably at home in Saleem's company listening to his tale. It is all so relaxed and integrated. Even words which I associate specifically with India blend into the general ambit so subtlety I pass them by without a second thought until, suddenly, I return to myself and ask : How come this book is written in English? And to answer that I have to seek help elsewhere. That help is very enlightening. Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay – not exactly on August 15th 1947, but near enough - on June 19th of that same year. He came to England, to Rugby public school. At Cambridge he read History and was part of the Footlights theatre company, which leaves me wondering how much the make-believe and transformed reality of the theatre influenced Rushdie’s later writing.

2nd perception : reality transformed

In the midst of all this reality, Midnight’s Children has two very obvious fingerprints of lo real maravilloso, magical reality. Something happens to our hero. His life is transformed. He finds himself able, at will, to inhabit the minds of other people, friends and strangers. He even sets out to make things happen by these means. Evie Burns, the American girl, has a splendid new silver bicycle. Saleem desires so much to ride this gorgeous machine. He exerts his newfound powers. He has his way. And at midnight, in his favourite hideaway place, he gathers to himself the five hundred and eighty-one surviving ten-year olds who share the magic of that fateful midnight birthing. Midnight’s Children’s Conference materialises into vivacity.
Much later, and against the very sinews of his being, he is taken into hospital for an operation. When he comes to, his gift has gone for ever. In its place he has an extraordinary nose. For the first time in his life, he is assailed by the aromas of his surroundings, the pungent smells of people. He can sniff out emotions hopes desires. During the Emergency he is a sniffer dog conscripted to hound out terrorists intellectuals and other subversives.

3rd perception : deep structure

I had been enjoying the opening chapters of Midnight’s Children. It was a rollicking good yarn. Then, once again, I was brought up short. There was another boy, Shiva by name, born in the selfsame Bombay nursing home, on that selfsame sensational midnight in 1947. When Mary Pereira, the young Christian midwife, was alone with the two boys, as a private revolutionary act for her very own Joseph, she exchanged the name tags of the two infants. I stop and say to myself ‘Creation Myth’. I recall the terrible images of the Gandhi film, the slaughter and destruction that followed partition. And at that moment this was for me no longer just a rattling good yarn, not even just a literary production to be pursued for signs of lo real maravilloso. I begin to think on those awful consequences of partition. The midnight bell tolled in Bombay. British India was dead. Others were left to pick up the pieces. Would we never learn? Ireland? Cyprus? The Balfour Declaration?
I resume my reading, but my vision of this novel is irreparably changed. And it does not stop there. Now, whenever I start to read a novel, I find myself alert for deep structure, for myths, and for vital messages concealed beneath surface imagery.
There is a point at which Rushdie, the sniffer dog, changes the pace of his narrative. It is slower and more condensed. A welcome contrast to the allegro giocoso of the first movement and to the finale which follows. I begin to share the anguish the anger the despair of Rushdie’s text. I begin to understand how writers can become enemies of the state, how they may attract the fatwa which condemns them to death.
I cannot answer the question : Is this story of Saleem Sinai an external camouflage designed to conceal a message otherwise standing stark and bare in these pages?
I recall another leitmotif, the image of ‘the perfumed sheet’, the large white bedsheet with a roughly circular hole some seven inches in diameter cut into the centre, the sheet held up between the newly-qualified young doctor and the young woman patient. He is permitted to view only the small portion of her anatomy which she places against the aperture. Is this also a symbolic representation? A partition which admits inspection of only a minuscule portion of the situation on the other side? Is this also a warning, a sinister dropped hint? I suspect so.
And when Saleem’s sister, the Brass Monkey, is grown up, metamorphosed into Jamila the famous Singer, she performs in public behind a curtain, a partition, into which a small circular aperture has been insinuated, the better for her charming voice to be heard. When she walks abroad, the burqa – another partition – hides all but her eyes.

coda

Saleem in the city of his birth with Padma demanding more and more of his story. And the setting? A pickle factory. Should I positively seek beneath the surface of that ‘pickle’? Does that ‘pickle’ intentionally summarise all that has gone before? A single word signifying a pungent tangible reality? A single word transformed into a pejorative situation? A simple surface with a disturbing deep structure?

Words when spoken are potential magic. Words when written are symbols of enchantment.

© francis cameron
oxford, 1 march 2009