I have never read Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, but John Walsh's take on it in Circus of Dreams sums up my feelings about Rushdie's work in general:
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"I was dazzled, impressed, bewildered, and frankly exhausted. It was brilliant -- and it was just too much to process. All the dreams and mythologies, the births and deaths, the arguments and magic transformations, the tumbling, endlessly distracted logorrhoeic cascade of words and subjects, the jumping-bumping, hyperadrenalinated, huggery-muggery, jiggery-pokery tsunami of special effects. It was all very impressive but just a touch _frantic_.
"I thought Rushdie was trying too hard to convey _hilarity_, Keystone Kops slapstick, the speeded-up fun of the fairground, while simultaneously dealing with weighty matters of Indian history and identity. James Joyce had a word for this quality: 'jocoserious,' the business of being both earnest and strenuously farcical at the same time."
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