Fiction A hundred pages into Salman Rushdie's monstrously rich and bewildering chronicle of life on the Indian subcontinent from 1918, his narrator is stil saddled with dreams of imagin- ary ancestors and in Tristram Shandy's predicament: that is, not yet born into his own story. But the clock is counting down towards India's partition. And at the very midnight of India's independence, Saleem Sinai, sw,itched in his swaddlinrg clothes certainly, but nonethe- less endowed with powers of wizardry that enable him to pick up the thoughts of others "like a first class radio" takes his place as a child of a rich family. Saleem spends his childhood in India, and his adolescence in Pakistan; in a Moslem background with a multiplicity of alternative realities all round him. (His mother's real son is brought up in street poverty, becomes a gangleader at eight, and appears late in the book as one of Indira Gandhi's henchmen.) Aside from his inner world of voices (which disappear when his parents attend to his adenoids) Saleem lives out the mysterious rhyming jingle of a fake guru, from his first vision of an adulterous mother to the hor- rors of forcible vasectomy before he is thirtv. But the book is witty as well as strange, with pungent dialogue as well as confusing super- stitions; and I haven't been so continuously surprised by a novel since I first read One Hundred Years of Solitude. Nina Bawden's novel is in an altogether more familiar mode. No mysteries here about artists receiving insights to which they have no natural access; nor any anxiety about whether disasters are in some sense made to happen by their teling. For the heroine at the centre of the book is very much the contem- porary English novelist, shrewdly making use of her own life and. those of her friends to give her material for her books. The strengths come from catching real life ironies, where other writers might have regis- tered bitterness. (And the heroine, especially as mother, is in no way flattered.) Its hard not to feel a certain sympathy when her parents, trying to be kind about their daughter's occupation, comment: "-'s a nice occupation for a married tDomanL " "There aren't many who'd stick it as you have done." And the fear that is there throughout, the guilt at her' relationship to other people, imposed by her understanding of the writer's role, goes far deeper than her study of her first marriage, relationship to her present husband, or even anxiety over a son in prison. "It's all meat and drink to-her. She'll take it into herself and spew it out" There is little occasion here for that useful mud and slime into which our resentments sink to become the creative sedimCnt of the imagination: but no one understands that more clearly than Nina Bawden. It rmakes for a chillingly precise noveL The distinction of all Pamela Hansford Johnson's work rests on an altogether warmer per- ception of reality, and in this latest novel she is at her best in writing of the gentle experience of married love; the intimacies and unexplored jealousies between mother and daughter; and the ordinary ill-luck of widowing and ill-chosen marriage partners. The book is suffused with a period charm. Yet it is a very slight book. What seems to be going to give the book its form, a series of anonymous poison-pen letters which gloat over the young heroine's misfortumes and gibe at her attempts to find happi- ness is brought to a rather tame conclusion. But whatever else, it offers human satisfactions and recognitions in that long and honourable tradition of. English fiction of which Miss Johnson is so much a part. Elaine Feinstein Fiction Midnight's Children By Salman Rushdie (Can,e f694; Walking Naked By Nina Bawden (Macmillanr f5 9V; A Bonfire By Pamela HansLord Johnson fMacmillan. ?5.95)