Sighing...

'Moor' Zogoiby, the protagonist, is very reminescent of Salman Rushdie himself. Like Moor, Rushdie knows about a life spent in banishment from normal society--Rushdie because of the fatwa that followed The Satanic Verses, Moor because he ages at twice the rate of normal humans. Yet Moor's story of travail is bigger than Rushdie's; it encompasses a grand struggle between good and evil while Moor himself stands as allegory for Rushdie's home country of India. Filled with wordplay and ripe with humour, it is an epic work, and Rushdie has the tools to pull it off. Moor is only son of a wealthy, artistic Bombay family, finds himself at crisis point. After a tragic love affair, 'Moor' plunges into a life of depravity in Bombay before leaving for involvement in financial scandal in London and, in the end, violence in Spain involving a childhood friend.
Rushdie has received some heavy criticism from Indian reviewers for not 'being true' to the image of India. However, one suspects Rushdie does not intend to give a journalistic account of India, or anything else for that matter, but rather to create a possible world, which resembles this one, in many important respects. Furthermore, this 'fantasy' world can be more meaningful for its having been simplified in some respects and complicated in others.
Salman Rushdie revisits some of the same ground he covered in his greatest novel, Midnight's Children. He earned a 1995 Whitbread Prize for his efforts.