of speech, full of popular gusto and broad humour. The opening is arresting, and the
scenery and the technique are new; the structure is episodic, working by parallel
rather than sequence. Eventually, however, the conceit that a character can allegorize
the recent history of a sub-continent staggers under its burden. The novel is presum-
ably for British readers coming from or acquainted with India, but for readers unfa-
miliar with India it is a difficult read; more so than other novels by Indians living
abroad, those for example of Rohinton Mistry, a straightforward narrator, or the
multi-talented Vikram Seth.Midnight’s Children also slips at times into the mimetic
fallacy: the belief that the way to show chaos and confusion is to be chaotically
confusing. The final words of the text suggest the size of the problem which has been
attempted: ‘it is the privilege and the curse of midnight’s children to be both masters
and victims of their times, to forsake privacy and be sucked into the annihilating
whirlpool of the multitudes and to be unable to live or die in peace.’
Penelope Lively
Historical ambition clamours for attention; literary quality is recognized by time.
DamePenelope Lively(1933– ) is a fine writer, whose work earns her a high place.
The historical aspect of her Moon Tigermay be why this particular novel won her the
Booker prize in 1987; it may have been the best Booker-listed book in 1987 but is not
her best. The heroine is supposed to be a famous journalist-historian, who, as she is
dying, recalls her life. Her love affair in Egypt in the Second World War is convinc-
ing, as are other episodes, but it is hard to take the chief character as a historian; and
the book has at least one character, a refugee, who is too clearly a token casualty of
history. The great French novelist Stendhal believed that ‘Any political idea in a work
of art is like a pistol-shot in the middle of a concert.’ Critics who believe in ‘commit-
te d’fiction disagree. But the historical-factual contribution to a novel – its debt to
‘r esearch’ – should be properly subordinated to its narrative.
‘Post-colonial’?
Britain became post-imperial in 1947 with Indian independence; her African
colonies gained self-rule in the 1960s.Commonwealth Literature then began to be
studied in British universities, but some of the writers read under this umbrella
disliked its name. This is perhaps why the term ‘post-colonial’ has come to colonize
university English. A need to capture and categorize the changes of an accelerating
world may explain the appeal of labels such as ‘post-colonial’ and ‘post-modernist’.
Whatever their original senses, overuse has hackneyed them into terms of conven-
ience. They are sometimes used as dump-bins.
‘Post-colonial’ ought to denote the condition of having been a colony; as in the
United States after 1783. Some Irish critics apply it to Irish writing of the period after
- The term is applied to Chinua Achebe’s 1958 novel Things Fall Apart,
concerned with a local culture in colonial Nigeria, a country which became inde-
pendent in 1960. (Achebe’s title comes from ‘The Second Coming’, a poem published
by the Anglo-Irish W. B. Yeats in the year in which most of Ireland became inde-
pendent.) Academic usage applies ‘post-colonial’ to the writings of immigrants to
Britain from former colonies. Not T. S. Eliot, nor writers from the older
Commonwealth resident in the UK, such as Doris Lessing, Peter Porter, or Fleur
Adcock. Nor is ‘post-colonial’ applied to Patrick White, born in Kensington,
educated in Sydney and at Cambridge; White returned to Australia, where his novels,
THE EMPIRE OF FICTION 423