A Hell of a Book (The Satanic Verses - Salman Rushdie)

Member Name: Deany

Product:	The Satanic Verses - Salman Rushdie
Date:	15/04/02 (3401 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Brilliant language, makes you think

Disadvantages: Disconnected narrative, ambiguous ending

“The Satanic Verses” is one of those books that is bound to get a reaction with the mere mention of its name. Along with other books like “The Kama Sutra” and “Mein Kampf”, it has been heard of by just about everybody, and just about everybody has an opinion of some sort on it – but the number of people to have actually read the book is probably much lower than its reputation suggests.

Before reading the book myself, I had clear memories of scenes of book-burning on the evening news and the word “fatwa” appearing every time Salman Rushdie’s name was mentioned. It’s hardly surprising, then, that I was expecting the book to be quite a dry, critical look at Islam and, as a result, stayed well away. Heavyweight theological musings are not my idea of a good read.

However, after being convinced by a friend of mine that it was worth reading, I got quite a pleasant surprise when I first opened the book. Right from the first word, the language used by the author is playful and vibrant – Indian expressions merge with English, words run together to emphasis points justlikethat and the whole way in which Rushdie writes lets you know straight away that he is not the sort of person to play by the rules. This was not the dry, academic thesis on religion that I was expecting. Indeed, Rushdie himself claims that the book "isn't actually about Islam but about migration, metamorphosis, divided selves, love, death, London and Bombay."

So, before I do look at the religious parts of the book, what else is there in the “Satanic Verses”? Well, most of the non-religious issues are to do with identity, nationality and a sense of belonging. This is shown in two ways – at one extreme we have the immigrant population of London (Indians, Pakistanis, Africans) who have left behind one homeland for a country that ignores and sidelines them. In some sections (that I ho
pe are exaggerations), the police seize on any excuse to round up Asian youths and give them beatings in the safety of their vans before dropping them off miles away from home. At other times the characters have their food spat on or are insulted for no other reason than the colour of their skin. Rushdie is attempting to portray an immigrant’s view of Britain and , as he points out, it is a sad irony “that after working for five years to give voice and fictional flesh to the immigrant culture of which I myself am a member, I should see my book burned, largely unread, by the people it's about -- people who might find some pleasure and much recognition in its pages."

At the other extreme, though, you have a central Indian character – Saladin Chamcha – who has deliberately turned his back on India and embraced English culture. When he returns to India early in the novel he is disgusted by what he sees and appalled at the way his fine English accent begins to break down into the Indian of his youth. He sees India as a backwards, dirty country and finds it almost impossible to find fault with England – the country he has now come to see as home. The reader can imagine that Rushdie himself is caught somewhere between these two extremes; he is now a British citizen and lives here, but his roots will always lie in India.

But now, to get to the religion. The book opens with a fall from heaven – the two main characters Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha are falling from a plane that has just been blown apart by terrorists over the English Channel. As they fall, they argue. By all rights they should be killed when they hit the sea, but Gibreel begins to flap his arms in an attempt to fly and – miraculously – the two men survive. However, the fall has had a strange effect on them; the next day Saladin begins to grow hooves and horns and, in a certain light, it looks like Gibreel has a halo glowing arou
nd his head.

The rest of the novel follows Saladin and Gibreel as they attempt to come to terms with what has happened to them and with the subsequent changes they undergo. Is Saladin becoming the Devil? And is Gibreel becoming the Archangel Gabriel? Rushdie stays away from easy answers and the various plots soon begin to merge, intertwine or shoot off at tangents. Take Gibreel, for example – at times he is positively angelic, at one point he even flies above London and changes the tepid British weather into the tropical heat he is used to in India. Or does he? Is he merely delusional? The doctors he see diagnose him as schizophrenic and give him heavy medication that leaves him disconnected from reality. And yet, he sees things and does things that no ordinary man could.

And Saladin, supposedly becoming the Devil. Yet, he is not evil, he makes friends and just tries to get along with his life. When he discovers his wife sleeping with one of his friends he leaves them to get on with it and moves to a different part of the house. His one true evil act in the novel is nothing disastrous on the grander scale. Sometimes Saladin and Gibreel seem to be acting in the opposite way we would expect for the roles they have taken on. But, then again, Satan himself was a fallen angel – perhaps Rushdie is saying that there is no such thing as absolute good or evil, just a grey, blurred mixture of the two.

After reading this far into the book I was beginning to wonder what all the fuss was about. Sure, Rushdie was writing about angels and the Devil, but I couldn’t see how that would have led to a death sentence being pronounced against him. Then, though, I hit the next section of the book, which is concerned with the life of a character called Mahound living somewhere in the Middle East about one and a half thousand years ago.

“Mahound” is a derogatory name for Mohammed used by Christian missionaries in satirical p
lays in the last century. And, although many elements are fictional, the Mahound in this book is almost a direct parallel to the Mohammed of Islam. Rushdie shows Mahound to be a shrewd businessman and leader of a religious group who begins to have convenient visions of the Archangel Gabriel (these sections are represented as dreams by the character “Gibreel” in the present day). The visions always seem to appear when Mahound is in trouble and needs to placate his small group of followers – Gabriel always appears to Mahound and Mahound alone and backs up whatever Mahound has been saying.

This is where the Satanic Verses put in an appearance. The people in Mahound’s town worship a variety of gods and goddesses, whereas Mahound and his followers worship Allah alone. In an effort to appease the locals, Mahound has a “vision” in which Gabriel/Gibreel tells him that it is alright for the locals to worship three local goddesses in addition to Allah and these verses are written to the Koran. Later, though, Mahound changes his mind and removes the verses, claiming that they were satanic and replaces them with verses denouncing the goddesses. This relates to an actual event in Mohammed’s own life that was documented by scholars at the time, although many modern-day Muslims refuse to admit that Mohammed was ever wrong and say the tale of the Satanic Verses is a lie.

It is this storyline that led to the fatwa being pronounced against Rushdie. Later in his tale of Mahound, Rushdie shows the prophet not realising that his scribe is changing the verses he writes to subvert his message and even has a harem of prostitutes who model themselves on Mahound’s wives (claimed by some Muslims to be as insulting as claiming that the Virgin Mary was a prostitute to a Catholic). As a non-religious person, many of these references went over my head and I did not take offence at any of the things Rushdie wrote about. In a novel
about Christianity, similar comments would probably have angered the Church, but it would not have caused a scandal of the size the “Satanic Verses” did for Islam. It is a shame that so many people focus on these passages, which are really just occasional paragraphs out of a novel nearly 500 pages long, and miss many of the other points Rushdie is making.

There are other storylines as well, which also play out as Gibreel’s dreams. In one, an entire village sets off on a pilgrimage to Mecca on foot because a young girl has a vision of Gabriel, only for many of them simply to fall dead on the way due to exhaustion. And in another, an exiled leader used Gibreel’s power to wrestle with a demon-queen ruling over his country. Sometimes these stories seem slightly irrelevant to the rest of the novel, at other times they intertwine with the other narrative strands and enrich them. One way in which Rushdie keeps the novel connected is by using the character names from one section for characters in another – as well as using a rich palette of symbols and allusions that run throughout the entire novel.

All in all, I enjoyed this book, but I couldn’t quite give it five stars. The message is just a little too ambiguous for my liking, the ending a little too unresolved. Although the various parts of the novel are linked, they never quite feel like they belong together entirely – at times I felt like I was reading a novel interspersed with short stories. Also, the characters felt a little false at times. Gibreel, for instance, swings between being a divine angelic being and a near-lunatic with violent, jealous outbursts – it is hard to get an understanding of the character because he changes so much and, as a result, you can never quite understand his motivations or actions. Perhaps some of my complaints are ignorance. If I knew more about Islam I might find it easier to understand the points that Rushdie is making
, but – especially because Rushdie has alienated his Muslim audience – I imagine many readers of this book will be in the same boat as me.

So, to sum up, a good book, one that certainly made me think about a whole lot of things, not just religion. Rushdie’s writing style is enjoyable to read, but the subject matter was just a little too far beyond my sphere of knowledge and the arguments made a little too ambiguous for my liking. An evil book? Definitely not. A good read? Yes – if you fancy giving the old grey cells a work-out, that is.

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