The Satanic Verses: A Novel (Bestselling Backlist)
by Salman Rushdie
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Book Summary Information
Author: Salman RushdieEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2000-12-01
ISBN: 0312270828
Number of pages: 561
Publisher: Picador
Book Reviews of The Satanic Verses: A Novel (Bestselling Backlist)
Book Review: We are all angels and devils...
Summary: 5 Stars
Many have argued that the Ayatollah Khomeni made "The Satanic Verses" a best seller. By declaring a fatwa against Salman Rushdie in 1989, so the claim goes, the Islamic Republic of Iran's first Supreme Ruler brought the blasphemous book worldwide attention, countless additional readers, and celebrity status for its apostate author. In the typical mass buying frenzy that follows controversy, marketing departments must have felt like puerile amateurs. Dang! Why didn't we think of blasphemy? Make a note of that! An amazed public, stunned that a mere book could cause an international incident, gobbled up copies. The banned, cursed, and burned book sold in droves. Then, as if to prove that the written word still carried weight in the electronic age, the violence began. Riots, killings, bombings pockmarked India, Pakistan, England, Japan, Turkey, Norway, and California. Trembling bookstore managers across the United States yanked the book from shelves with "It Can't Happen Here" ringing in their skulls. Rushdie, whose murder carried increasing monetary value (an Iranian businessman offered $3 million), went into hiding. Though he had already gained a reputation as an author, "Midnight's Children" in particular garnered much literary attention, "The Satanic Verses" vaulted Rushdie to international fame and infamy. And it continued to sell.
Controversy sells, but without the fatwa and the international media attention, Rushdie's fourth novel would have sold at least moderately well. Before the scandals, his reputation was rising amongst fans of literary fiction. "Midnight's Children" and "Shame" swam in thick puddings of symbolism, non-western cultural references, and labyrinthine narrative structures. "The Satanic Verses" includes these same elements to a heightened degree. For one, the curlique plot twists and bends like a large narrative intestine, bouncing the reader through time, dreams, myth, and illusion. Multiple themes, expressed as conflicting dualities, also weave throughout this almost Rube Goldberg-esque tale: faith and doubt, good and evil, love and hate, reality and dreams, sanity and insanity, the seen and the unseen. To top it off, Rushdie doesn't spoon feed any of this to readers. Those unacquainted with Indian traditions and language, Islam, Christianity, England, and non-western mythology will probably miss many of the rich thematic nuances. Some have even argued that disorientation for westerners remains one of the novel's central points. Though most of the story takes place in England proper, the western elements remain in the background. British characters either have indelible ties and dependencies to the main Indian characters, or they serve as caricatures or cartoons. This subverts novels that place westerners in an "exotic" location and marginalize that locale's inhabitants by placing them in the background like plastic set pieces (some point to Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" as an example). As such, "The Satanic Verses" presents a challenging, brain pumping, but mind opening, read.
The book also strains readers' suspension of disbelief throughout its dense pages. Characters metamorphize, change color, perform extraordinary mystical deeds, and see gods and goddesses. Much of the story works at the level of myth. Don't look for stark realism here. This evenholds for the novel's main characters, the thematically conjoined twins, Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha. At the novel's outset, they plummet from an exploding airliner. Gibreel, the cheery one named after an archangel, annoys Chamcha by singing. "To be born again first you have to die. Ho ji! Ho ji!" Chamcha, even while falling, begins to grow stubby horns. He will transform into a satyr devil goat like creature, complete with fire and brimstone halitosis. Gibreel, the duality's other half, becomes a God-like messiah figure. Many swear to see him levitate or to witness his blazing holy halo. On the surface one represents good and the other evil. But symbols can fool the senses, and the "angel" does not only perform angelic but also devlish acts. He drives his first wife to her death, betrays Chamcha, defies his religion by devouring pork ("no thunderbolts"), and convinces himself that he embodies the archangel Gabriel. But he also saves Chamcha's life, arguably twice, provides on-the-go therapy for outcasts, as well as other "angelic" duties. In effect, the angel devil symbolism doesn't validate the actions of the symbolized and the novel thus breaks down a false dichotomy of absolutes. Both characters contain requisite amounts of good and evil regardless of their disparate facades. So are the main characters people or symbols? They seem to exist in a hazy middleground between reality and myth. As does the entire book.
In February 2006 Iran announced that the fatwa was permanent. Regardless, Rushdie has resumed a "normal" public life. What inspired the Iranian government to put that enormous price on his head? "The Satanic Verses," after all, is not a diatribe against Islam. But two of its chapters, "Mahound" and "Return to Jahilia," retell the story of the rise of the Prophet Muhammad. "Jahilia" and "Yathrib" represent Calvino-esque reconstructions of Mecca and Medina. Muhammed gets renamed "Mahound," a name once used as a satirical insult. And, worst of all, one of Mahound's scribes, named Saladin (which ties him to the devilish Chamcha), intentionally alters Mahoud's recitations as a test. Mahound never notices these sleight-of-hand changes, even when Saladin changes "Christian" to "Jew." Though this relates to the book's theme of doubt, many Muslims saw this as a direct affront to the Prophet and to Islam. Rushdie also unearths the controversial story of the satanic verses. Through his research at Cambridge University he came along a story in which the Prophet Muhammad declares certain recited passages as "satanic" in origin. They get struck from the record. In the novel, Gibreel, acting as a confused and bumbling archangel, tells Mahound to accept the idols of Jahilia as a compromise. Mahound at first accepts but later renouces the recitation. The story remains controversial as it suggests that Shaitan himself once spoke through the Prophet. "The Satanic Verses," for these and other reasons, remains anathema throughout the Muslim world today.
No book in the last century has caused more furor. No book in recent memory has bisected two worlds so vividly. Rushdie, a former Muslim from India transplanted to England, straddles both. The wounds from the expanding fissure between these worlds have not yet healed. If anything they have festered and become gangrenous. We need perspective. In this vein, "The Satanic Verses" not only provides a rich and engaging literary experience, but also some perspective from which to examine the differences between two worlds that seem on the verge of a calamitous collision.
Summary of The Satanic Verses: A Novel (Bestselling Backlist)
Just before dawn one winter's morning, a hijacked jetliner explodes above the English Channel. Through the falling debris, two figures, Gibreel Farishta, the biggest star in India, and Saladin Chamcha, an expatriate returning from his first visit to Bombay in fifteen years, plummet from the sky, washing up on the snow-covered sands of an English beach, and proceed through a series of metamorphoses, dreams, and revelations.
No book in modern times has matched the uproar sparked by Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, which earned its author a death sentence. Furor aside, it is a marvelously erudite study of good and evil, a feast of language served up by a writer at the height of his powers, and a rollicking comic fable. The book begins with two Indians, Gibreel Farishta ("for fifteen years the biggest star in the history of the Indian movies") and Saladin Chamcha, a Bombay expatriate returning from his first visit to his homeland in 15 years, plummeting from the sky after the explosion of their jetliner, and proceeds through a series of metamorphoses, dreams and revelations. Rushdie's powers of invention are astonishing in this Whitbread Prize winner.
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