One thousand and one, Rushdie reminds us halfway through Midnight's Children, is ‘the number of night, of magic, of alternative realities’ (MC 212). And the novel is a modern odyssey, an epic navigation through these alternative realities: myth and history, memory and document, moonlight and daylight; the refractions of art, the centripetal and centrifugal dynamics of the self; the babel of languages, the alternating (and competing) religious and political understandings of the world. The challenge of Rushdie's project is to create a fiction that does justice to these multiple realities, bringing them together in a way that allows each strand a voice, a presence, without obliterating the others. Saleem Sinai refers at one point to the ‘two threads’ of his narrative, ‘the thread that leads to the ghetto of the magicians; and the thread that tells the story of Nadir the rhymeless, verbless poet’ (MC 46), but, although these are indeed central strands, the weave is much richer and more various than this phrase would suggest.

The basic narrative strategy is simple: the juxtaposition of the public and the private, the historical and the biographical – in what is, after all, a time-honoured technique, to be found in Plutarch, Shakespeare and Walter Scott as well as in Rushdie's modern exemplars. And so the ‘birth-of-a-nation’ theme in the novel is parallelled by the strictly synchronized birth of the central character (and first-person narrator) Saleem Sinai, representative as he is of the 1,001 magical children supposed to have been born in that historical hour after the declaration of independence by Jarwhal Nehru at the midnight before 15 August 1947. (Rushdie has since calculated that, in demographical fact, at two births per second, around 7,000 children would actually have been born during this time; so his magical number turns out to be ‘a little on the low side’ (IH 26).) And the mode of narration is (or appears to be) equally straightforward and well tried: Saleem tells his story to a simple woman, Padma, as they work together in the pickle factory that provides both a refuge for them at the end of the narrative and a metaphor for the fictional process itself.