It was Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children that introduced me to the idea of unreliable narration.

Until then, I guess I’d more or less taken my narrators at face value. If they told me it was raining, I believed them. If they told me another character was mean, ugly, stupid, I took their word. Why wouldn’t I? They were the narrator. Wasn’t there some sacred trust between writers and their readers that said that everything the character telling the story said was, de facto, the truth? Unless they openly admitted they were lying, or at least gave me some good, clear reason to doubt them? Surely, anything else would be cheating.

I read — I suppose I should say, studied — Midnight’s Children at university, as part of a course titled “Post-Colonial Literature.” Now that it’s enshrined as a literary masterpiece, now that it’s a Booker of Bookers, it’s probably a book destined to be studied more than it’s read. It was a good course, and it probably wasn’t the tutor’s fault it had been lumbered with such an unfortunate title. While it was going on, we talked far more about Magical Realism; looking back, though, with writers like Rushdie and Márquez forming a good chunk of the syllabus, it could just as easily have been called something like non-Eurocentric Fantasy.

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