A book to go in any long or short list of master pieces - Rated 
What can I say about midnight's children that has not already been said. I would put it on par with one hundred years of solitude. You have to read it to know what I am talking about.
Exciting - Rated 
Despite what some reviewers have said about this book I must say that I found it easy to get into. The characters are all so beautifully described with such fabulously intriguing details. The settings made me want to go to India. And as a book about India I enjoyed this enormously.
The parts set in Pakistan were more difficult for me. I really would have preferred the character to have stayed in India because I think that the book loses something by being transported suddenly to Pakistan.
I very rarely agree with the Booker Prize as being a good barometer of literary efforts, in fact I can barely think of one book that has won it that I have actually liked, but this book is something different. Perhaps just a bit too much of that 'magical realism' (sorry to people who like that).
A great read, but not perfect.
hype = a lot of hot air - Rated 
I was so excited when I first saw this book. A magic realist story about India? With politics, intrigue and tons of hype? Yes please!
But it turned out that the hype was just that: hype. I like my books long and involved, but this book could have been written in half the words used - never a good sign. The main character was irritating in the extreme, the language lacked clarity, and the entire style reeked of self-importance in a way that just made me want to bash my head (or better yet, the book) against something hard.
I'll be honest. I do my very best never to hate a book; they all have their redeeming qualities. And it is clear that Salman Rushdie put a lot of painstaking care and effort into the research behind Midnight's Children, and into the plot itself. An english literature undergrad once told me that it is technically brilliantly structured (I don't know why, but I'll take her word for it). So, if you're focus is more on the structure and research of a novel rather than the characters or readability, go ahead and read it. But frankly it just isn't my cup of tea.
Good but not great - Rated
Midnight's Children is a book one may approach with some kind of awe; something akin to entering a monument. First, there are the prizes it has received and the fame it lent to its writer. Then, there is the sheer ambition and courage of Salman Rushdie's enterprise: trying to capture the identity of a sub-continent and half a century of its history in a single book. Finally, there is the subject itself: the multitude and diversity of the Indian sub-continent, its complicated history, defy any attempt to neatly and rationally summarise it.
Now, to me, Midnight's Children feels more like a scale model of a monument than the real thing. To make myself clearer, it has all the ingredients but does not quite get there. Sure the story is engrossing and Salman Rushdie's ability to create a multi-layered tale from one single voice is amazing but, in my view, some flaws distinguish it as a very good book rather than a true masterpiece. I found some of the author's stylistic gimmicks annoying (his habit of putting three words together without separation sign becomes quickly tiresome and he never really rises to, say Faulkner or Celine's level, in his attempt to bend the boundaries of language into some form which more immediately embodies his subject) and his character's impulse to tease the reader jumping parts of the story before quickly coming back to a chronological order was repeated to often. Then the story itself loses some momentum in the last third of the novel.
All in all, these weaknesses should not prevent anybody from reading and enjoying this book, but for me this is not Salman Rushdie's masterpiece; the title pertains to Shalimar the Clown.
brilliant beguiling storyteller with ultimately nothing to tell - Rated 
I tried reading this in 1983 and failed after about a 100 pages but this year was prompted to try again and succeeded.
The secret is the sound and rhythm of the words. Rushdie is very skilled and seductive storyteller, switching between times and places, between the ordinary and the fantastic with ease. It would make an entrancing audio book. Much is very filmic: adeptly cutting between actions or conversations of characters in one place and those of others in another, whether proceeding in parallel never to meet or converging at a meeting point. The style of the story telling is beguiling. I can understand why Rushdie is of great interest to writers because of his style. I can also understand how the novel is grist to the academic mill because of the variety of techniques and running themes to be discussed, and the colonial and post-colonial background of the novel and its author writing in the language of the colonisers.
But to me the book was a disappointment. The narrator is very much a solipsistic teenage fantasist, even though he has reached the age of 30 by the end of the book. The people around him are two-dimensional charactertures, especially those outside the immediate family circle. He is has little or no insight into the motives of any of them. Although the narrator spends times, for example, living cut off from family amongst the urban impoverished, being a soldier serving in a war, and lost in the jungle, nothing outside his normal middle class life at home in the family has any feeling of reality.
When I first tried to read it I was expecting some insight into contemporary India. The background to the story is Indian history from the Amritsar massacre in 1919, through the period of rivalry between the Congress Party and the Muslim League, the consequent partition, and independence in 1947, and the Indo-Pakistani wars of 1965 and 1971, to the end of Indira Ghandi's 'emergency rule' in 1977. But, though knowledge of the history helps in understanding the novel's story and what might explain some of the fears, desires and behaviour of the characters, the novel provides no insight into that history, beyond reflecting some of the difficulties of a well-to-do middle class family, Muslim by background, Anglophone by education, predominately secular in outlook, facing the partition of their country on lines they do not want - having to chose between exclusively Muslim Pakistan or officially secular, multireligious but, in practice, Hindu-dominated and, from time to time, anti-Muslim India - and beyond saying allegorically that things had not turned out as well by 1977 as idealists might have hoped when the country was born in 1947.
The author's own biography is of a boy born in 1947, educated in an `English public school ethos' school in Bombay, then leaving India as a teenager to complete his education at a major public school in England, and then Cambridge University, before making a career for ten years as an advertising copywriter in London. Lack of deep and broad insight into India and its people, much beyond his own rather narrow background and what one can pick up from books, newspapers, TV docs and acquaintances in England, is perhaps unsurprising.
The book does have a vein of humour going through it, providing the bulk of memorable scenes, but it's humour largely of the Tristram Shandy variety.
If you are looking for something of Indian spirituality, you will find none of it here. If you are seeking insights into something beyond storytelling, whether human character or psychology, or the reality of India, or whatever, I suggest look elsewhere.
Reading this book did enable me to understand how its author, despite being born Muslim, could have gone on to write 'The Satanic Verses' and be apparently surprised shocked at the scale of the outrage it provoked.
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