The Satanic Verses

I finished The Satanic Verses last night. I’m sure that retrospectively, I’ll feel much more affection for this book than I did reading it, unless I’ve managed to get that idea so ingrained now that I always remember it first and foremost. There were undoubtedly some ideas of great brilliance here, and Rushdie has a pleasing writing style, a self-effacing grandiloquence, a way with words that suggests he has a mastery of the language but a modesty that allows him to mock himself and therefore prevent a wall being constructed between wright and reader. Nabokov has the same gift, but for his contemporary audience; The Satanic Verses was written in the 80s, and aside from some cardboard, slang-spouting teenagers, still has a certain degree of ‘hipness’.

The story is simple – if fantastical – and yet also convoluted. Two Indian men, both actors – one a brash movie star with heaps of arrogance and pride, the other a voice actor who’s spent his entire life trying to hide his heritage and fit in with the English he feels are to be venerated, even if the youth are spoiling the country’s proud heritage – are involved in the terrorist hijacking of a plane. After bonding, to a degree, during their captivity, they somehow survive the midair explosion and in plummeting to Earth, are transformed, characteristics to a degree swapped – the film actor Gibreel Farishta into the archangel who inspired his name, and the voice actor Saladin Chamcha (née Salahudin Chamchawala) into a demon. Then begins the protracted and uninteresting main portion of the book, in which Gibreel has fantasies of various stories of the archangel’s influence, like inspiring an entire village to go on a pilgrimage to Mecca, a minor story whose story-book ending is the perhaps the low point of the novel, and begins to think himself an angel searching for his powers and redeeming sinners while most around him think him merely delusional, while Saladin grows horns and a tail and is forced to hide inside the soap opera of an Indian family living in a café, where tradition and spirited youths intoxicated by Western concepts of freedom clash (and we’re supposed to accept that horns and halos could become feasible everyday fashion accessories), also getting mixed up in some very over-exaggerated political situations. This part is protracted and disjointed, and it’s hard to care about old ladies who see visions of invading armies only to be forgotten, and while Allie’s ascent of Everest was interesting to read about and justified when her character becomes a major part of the story, it could have had an equal impact at half the length.

The highlight of this part of the book is Gibreel’s visions of himself appearing to the prophet ‘Mahound’, giving a social and religious context to the Muhammad story with remarkable realism. It is this part that resulted in the fatwa against Rushdie and all the resultant criticism. It centres on the relationship between Muhammad and the sceptical poet Baal, first with Muhammad struggling against a polytheistic society with only a handful of followers, and later with Muhammad a powerful leader whose bloodthirsty underlings force Baal to seek refuge in a harem. It is the portrayal of Muhammad as a cold-hearted businessman, a sell-out who accepted false gods to get a foothold in the theocracy, only to retract his words later, and even as a liar who was claiming divine inspiration only to put himself above question – whose angel appeared at very convenient times to lay very convenient laws – which is understandably controversial. It seemed to me that a little more balance may have been preferable, but perhaps that would have undermined the purpose of the segments, and would have been difficult from Baal’s point of view.

The last part of the book is the worthwhile part, the conclusion of the pilgrims’ story aside. Here our main characters’ stories become truly significant, and once again it is the green-eyed monster that drives the plot, with Saladin cleverly and eerily sowing the seeds of Gibreel’s downfall. The very end is a little flat, and I don’t know why we need to have such a frank and detailed depiction of human decline just to make the point that one can die contented without believing in God, but the machinations and the execution of the plan, as well as how it ties into the title, is done with skill.

Ultimately, a book I’m glad I read, and certainly validated in stylistic terms, but it was frustrating, trepanning for gold when there was really too much sludge.

I think I’ll take a break with something nice and light. Philip Reeve’s cutesy steampunk-flavoured Larklight, then The Kite Runner, then some more silly fantasy, and then after that Anna Karenina?