Dear Mr Rushdie,
I was born in the same year Midnight's Children was released. While you irrevocably changed the face of the Indian novel -- all the while tweaking its nose -- with spellbinding verbal pyrotechnics and tremendous magic realism, I took my first steps. There is no way to softpedal the kinship I feel with that novel or any of your subsequent and former words, and I have grown up, humbly and inconsequentially, in the ever-expanding shadow of what you have written. Handcuffed to your words, so to speak. This might be a major publication and they might title what I am now writing as a column, but I, sir, am a groupie.
Which makes this unsolicited yet crucial missive far far harder to write. While whooping with immeasurable glee in the news that you will finally be writing a sequel to my favourite book, Haroun And The Sea Of Stories, I must confess that my jaw fell unflatteringly open when I heard of the upcoming Midnight's Children cinematic adaptation. I gasped and huffed and puffed, and it took me a while to collect my thoughts and address you as I am now.
The story of Saleem Sinai is a multilayered work of astonishing brilliance that is, in its original form, impossible to translate to screen. Not that great films haven't come out of unfilmable novels -- Kubrick based a career on doing it bloody well -- and I must say I had a ball at the Barbican a few years ago when I saw the RSC perform their own version of the novel -- written by you alongside Tim Supple -- which was most entertaining. The Doors playing in the background, referencing Apocalypse Now, somehow totally gelled with that delightful stage interpretation, and Zubin Varla was a terrific Saleem.
You, of course, know this. You are preparing to roll up sleeves and muddy your hands with screenplay again, tackling the project afresh -- after already having been through a few gruelling, revolutionary drafts. You've always hoped that Midnight's Children would find its way onto the screen, and felt justifiably heartbroken when India, fickle mother, didn't allow the BBC to shoot its series in the country. You want to do it bigger and better and get that fantastic novel the movie it so completely deserves, and for that endeavour all us fans of the book wish you the very, very best.
Thing is, Whimsy is the single hardest feel to capture adequately on screen. There are filmmakers who excel at high drama and those who make slapstick seem genius, but absurdity isn't everyone's game at all. And Whimsy, in my irrelevant opinion, is what runs through your work the strongest, the raft which helps us float from heavy allegory to incisive satire, the unifying current in your sea of stories. And here I must say, running the risk of being offensive, that the director you have attached to the current project can't quite do Whimsy.
You know better, obviously. And while I don't mean to belittle Deepa Mehta's cinematic achievements -- I personally feel Fire was a raw, more honest film than it is given credit for, and some sequences of Earth were indeed striking -- I somehow do not see her suited to an adaptation of this fantastico-political masterpiece. Midnight's Children is a film that craves as much wit as wisdom, as much madness as metaphor, and despite the fact that Ms Mehta's intimate acquaintance of India may possibly help the project, the very idea fills me with trepidation. And I'm not alone.
The fear is indubitably one of eventual misrepresentation. The film might be an art-house success, win a bagful of awards and, most importantly, reach far more people than the book has touched -- but this wouldn't