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The Satanic Verses, a Review

First, some background information compiled from Newsweek and Time Magazine when the book was first published in 1988:

In issuing his decree against Salmon Rushdie and his book, The Satanic Verses, Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini drew worldwide attention to a novel that otherwise might have gone largely unnoticed by many people. It is Khomeini who helped make The Satanic Verses a bestseller.

The 100,000 copies first distributed in the United States quickly sold out. Another 200,000 copies were expected any day. I was told on the day I sought out my own copy. I was 90th on a waiting list at at a St. Louis Brentano's bookstore, where 200 copies of the book were due momentarily.

The call came on a Tuesday night. The books are in. We will hold your copy until Saturday. I quickly asked the saleswoman to put it on my card and ship the book via UPS next-day delivery. I immediately laughed at myself because somewhere deep down I felt afraid someone -- a Muslim radical! -- would somehow find out I had ordered the forbidden book. I pushed aside these foolish feelings. I am safe in Poplar Bluff, I kept telling myself. Besides, I don't know any Muslims, much less fanatics.

The book arrived on Thursday, concealed in an unmarked brown envelope. I sensed I somehow had achieved my own small victory over the fearsome and oppressive Khomeini as I broke open the book and eased back its stiff new bindings, and breathed in deeply the fresh ink of its pages.

My eagerness was tempered as I reminded myself the book apparently had brought pain to a great many Muslim faithful, and as I knew only a little about Muslims, their faith or their culture, I sensed I may somehow be mocking them by reading it.

My devotion to freedom of expression won out, however, as that was the reason I pursued the book at all.

I would describe Rushdie's novel as a discourse on the age-old topic of good versus evil and the question of which is the inherent nature of man. Rushdie's imagination is incredibly diverse and his use of language brilliant. His plot, however, seemed to me extremely complicated as the action shifts among his characters and their changing states of consciousness. But popping up like corks in a tide of confusing, twisted plots are profound statements about life. The work is rich in allegory, perhaps to a fault, and brings forth some poignant aphorisms.

In reviewing this book, I will provide a basic outline of the plots, describe several of the passages reportedly found to be especially offensive by Muslims, and share some of the book's passages I find to be exceptional. In doing so, please rejoice with me in the fact that as Americans we are able to read what we like, discuss what we like and express what we like. But perhaps more importantly, we are unable to silence that which we do not like.

(A brief aside, here. It is interesting to note that in the course of writing this, my computer keyboard inexplicably "froze up" and would not be freed. After numerous attempts I had to turn off the power and I lost all of my work to this point. "Khomeini zapped me!" I jokingly told my husband as I took a break for lunch.)

Here is some additional descriptive information compiled from articles that appeared at the time in Newsweek and Time magazines:

Our story begins as the two central characters -- both Indian actors -- find themselves falling out of the sky as their jetliner bound for London is blown to bits by terrorists. Gibreel Farishta, a dashing leading man and film star in Bombay, has left his world of fame and fortune to pursue the love of his life, a woman of adventure who has climbed Mount Everest, in London. His reluctant companion is Saladin Chamcha, a successful commercial voice-over man with a talent for impersonation. The two middle-aged actors have an animated conversation as they hurtle toward earth. They somehow land safely, but then their troubles begin anew. Gibreel dreams himself into the persona of the archangel Gabriel; Chamcha grows horns and hooves and temporarily turns into the devil. An extravagant cast of characters leads us from the deserts of ancient Arabia to the slums of modern London,and a tortuous plot ends on a pleasingly sentimental note. Along the way, the author writes about his schooling and young adulthood in Britain, about his love for Bombay, and the death of his father. He explores the roots of his Muslim faith and retells some legends of the Prophet Muhammed in whimsical and outrageous ways, taking care to offer up these sequences as dreams or even dreams within dreams by characters who may or may not be mad. Some of the most congested sequences in the book are those describing the birth of a religion that looks very much like Islam. These events, dreamed by Gibreel in the course of a drawn-out mental breakdown, are derived form traditional accounts of Muhammed's life, but Rushdie spins them into fantasy and embroiders them with irreverent touches of sex, humor and politics. Rushdie's fictional prophet is called Mahound, the name that 19th century Christian missionaries mockingly used in the medieval religious plays for a satanic version of Muhammed. At least one of Mahound's followers, "a bum from Persia" who shares the author's first name, becomes convinced that Mahound is little more than a charismatic charlatan. Salman commits an unthinkable sin. His job is to write down the revelations of God as recited by Mahound, but he repeatedly changes Mahound's words. When the prophet realizes this, he explodes: "Your blasphemy cannot be forgiven." The punishment is death. But Mahound is merciful and finally spares the life of Salman the book character. But the same cannot be said for Salman Rushdie. His passages satirize a belief at the heart of Islam, that the Koran is the word of God revealed to Muhammed by the archangel Gabriel. Another of Rushdie's bitterly disputed passages deals with the famous Satanic Verses from which the novel takes its title. Her Mahound is tempted by Gibreel to cut a deal with the enemies of his embryonic faith and tolerate the worship of three of their goddesses alongside the one God. Gibreel later tells Mahound the idea came from Satan and the prophet orders acceptance of the rival deities to be stricken from the holy text. Perhaps the most sensational episode takes place in a brothel and bestows on prostitutes the names of Muhammed's wives. This is outrageous to Muslims since they revere their prophet's spouses as "mothers of all believers." Rushdie does not present Mahound's wives as fallen women, though; rather, the prostitutes borrow the names and gradually take on the identities of the wives to mock Mahound. One Muslim, quoted in Time, likens this episode to "presenting the Virgin Mary as a whore." Defenders of the book point out that, as in the brothel scene, scurrilous material is often not Rushdie's own characterization of Muhammed and his followers but is instead the accusations of the idolaters whom the prophet is seeking to overthrow.

While Rushdie's book is somewhat tedious, the author makes many humorous, and at times outrageous, observations. Among them:

Gibreel the movie star has a particularly nasty case of halitosis, which his irreverent leading lady Pimple Billimore describes as "breath of rotting cockroach dung. Damn good for him the movies don't smell, or he wouldn't get a job as a leper even." The author remarks, "in life, unlike the cinema, people know if you stink."

Caught in a culture no longer his own, Chamcha, visiting Bombay but feeling like an Englishman inside, observes a warning from his motherland: "... don't come back again. When you have stepped through the looking glass you step back at your peril. The mirror may cut you to shreds."

Speaking of culture: "Our heritage, my dear, every day the U.S.A. is taking it away. Ravi Varna paintings, Chendela bronzes, Jaisalmer lattices. We sell ourselves, isn't it? They drop their wallets on the ground and we kneel at their feet. Our Nandi bull ends up in some gazebo in Texas."

Of an American tourist: "It was a hard fate to be an American abroad, and not to suspect why you were so disliked."

Of sympathy to hijackers: "If you live in the twentieth century you do not find it hard to see yourself in those, more desperate than you, who seek to shape it to their will."

Of God and science: "The leaflet argued that even the scientists were busily re-inventing God, that once they had proved the existence of a single unified force of which electromagnetism, gravity and the strong and weak forces of the new physics were all merely aspects ... avatars, one might say, or angels, then what would we have but the oldest thing of all, a supreme entity, controlling all creation ... You see, what our friend says is, if you have to choose between some type of disembodied force-field and the actual living God, which one would you go for, na? You can't pray to an electric current. No point asking a wave-form for the key to Paradise."

Rushdie's own fate is foretold in the fate of the first passenger to be executed by the hijackers: an apostate traitor who became their target because of his decision to give up the turban and cut his hair, which made him a traitor to his faith.

Of human nature: "Angels are easily pacified: turn them into instruments and they'll play you a harpy tune. Human beings are tougher nuts, can doubt anything, even the evidence of their own eyes."

Of religion: "From the beginning man used God to justify the unjustifiable."

Of our need for love: "The actor's life offers, on a daily basis, the simulation of love; a mask can be satisfied, or at least consoled, by the echo of what it seeks. The desperation there was in him ... he'd do anything, put on any damnfool costume, change into any shape, if it earned him a loving word."

Of the state of man: "Something was badly amiss with the spiritual life of the planet ... Too many demons inside people claiming to believe in God."

Of exile: "Exile is a vision of revolution .. it is an endless paradox: looking forward by always looking back. He hangs there, frozen in time, translated into a photograph; denied motion, suspended impossible above his native earth, he awaits the inevitable moment at which the photograph must begin to move, and the earth to reclaim its own."

Of the godless: "Human beings who turn away from God lose love, and certainty, and also the sense of His boundless time, that encompasses past, present and future; the timeless time, that has no need to move."

Of victims: "Ideologically, I refuse to accept the position of victim. Certainly, he has been victimized, but we know that all abuse of power is in part the responsibility of the abused; our passiveness colludes with, permits such crimes."

Of history: "Why did rebirth, the second chance grated to Gibreel Farishta and himself, feel so much, in this case, like a perpetual ending? He had been reborn into the knowledge of death; and the inescapability of change, of things-never-the-same, of no-way-back, made him afraid.

"When you lose the past, you're naked in front of contemptuous Azraeel, the death angel. Hold on to what you can, he told himself. Cling to yesterdays. Leave your nail-marks in the gray slope as you slide."

Of expression: "The real language problem: how to bend it, shape it, how to let it be our freedom, how to repossess its poisoned wells, how to master the river of words of time of blood: about all that you haven't got a clue ... Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true."

Of awe of nature: "Everest silences you ... When you come down, nothing seems worth saying, nothing at all.You find the nothingness wrapping you up, like a sound. Non-being. You can't keep it up, of course. The world rushes in soon enough.

"What shuts you up is, I think, the sight you've had of perfection: why speak if you can't manage perfect thoughts, perfect sentences? It feels like a betrayal of what you've been through. But it fades; you accept that certain compromises, closures, are required if you're to continue."

Rushdie is a master of understatement as it relates to the bizarre plot and the course of events that befall the character Chamcha:

"When you've fallen from the sky, been abandoned by your friend, suffered police brutality, metamorphosed into a goat, lost your work as well as your wife, learned the power of hatred and regained human shape, what is there left to do but, as you would no doubt phrase it, demand your rights?"

Other remarks, overstating the obvious, include:

"To be born again, first you have to die."

"You can't judge an internal injury by the size of the hole."

"The question that's asked here remains as large as ever it was: which is, the nature of evil, how it's born, why it grows, how it takes unilateral possession of a many-sided human soul."

And, "What is unforgivable?"

The ironies of life are evident in the book's two main characters: the movie star angel whose thoughts are evil and the voice-over devil whose thoughts are more innocent:

"Are they not conjoined opposites, these two, each man the other's shadow? -- One seeking to be transformed into the foreignness he admires, the other preferring, contemptuously, to transform; one, a hapless fellow who seems to be continually punished for uncommitted crimes, the other called angelic by one and all, the type of man who gets away with everything."

On evil: "Evil may not be as far beneath our surfaces as we like to say it is. -- That, in fact, we fall towards it naturally, that it is not against our natures -- And that Chamcha set out to destroy Gibreel because, finally, it proved so easy to do; the true appeal of evil being the seductive ease with which one may embark upon that road."

Rushdie describes his characters' predicaments as a case of "character versus destiny: a free-style bout."

He also observes, "This is the judgment of God in his wrath: that men be granted their hearts' desires, and that they be by them consumed."

He also makes several conclusions as his character comes to terms with the death of his father:

"Death brought out the best in people."

And, "What was it that waited for him, for all of us, that brought such fear to a brave man's eyes?"

And, finally, after his father is gone:

"Yes, this looked like the start of a new phase, in which the world would be solid and real, and in which there was no longer the broad figure of a parent standing between himself and the inevitability of the grave. An orphaned life, like Muhammed's; like everyone's. A life illuminated by a strangely radiant death, which continued to glow, in his mind's eye, like a sort of magic lamp."

Other observations: "Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that's what."

On the author's fate as a writer: "The writer agrees to the ruination of his life, and gains (but only if he's lucky) maybe not eternity, but posterity, at least. Either way, it's the Devil who wins."

Finally, a hopeful note at the end of the novel:

"It seemed that in spite of all his wrong-doing, weakness, guilt -- in spite of his humanity -- he was getting another chance. There was no accounting for one's good fortune, that was plain."

 

 

(Presented in 1989 to the members of the Monday Literary Club,
established in 1911 in Poplar Bluff, Mo.)

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