The Satanic Verses
Although 'The Satanic Verses,' Salman Rushdie's
novel, has
already created controversy over religion and freedom of expression -
the book has been banned in India, Pakistan, Egypt, South Africa and
other countries after protests from Muslims who said the book offended
their faith and its
Prophet, Mohammed -the volume deals only
incidentally with Islam. Indeed, the figure Mahound (who some critics
say is a thinly and perversely disguised representation of the Prophet)
turns out to be a character in the
dream of another character, who may
or may not be suffering from mental illness - a bit player in Mr.
Rushdie's play within a play within a play. Whereas
'Midnight's Children' (1981) employed myth and an armory of
hallucinatory techniques to depict the gradual erosion of hopes
nurtured by Indian independence, and 'Shame' (1983) used Mohammad Zia
ul-Haq's brutal rise to
power as a springboard for creating a
phantasmagorical portrait of a country that was 'not quite Pakistan,'
'The Satanic Verses' is less concerned with
history than with the
broader questions of good and evil, identity and metamorphosis, race
and
culture. As in the earlier novels, allusions (to everything from
'The Thousand and One Nights' to 'Paradise Lost' to 'Tristram
Shandy') proliferate throughout the text, while the tone of the novel
veers daringly from the slapstick to the melodramatic. The
story begins simply enough with a miracle. A plane flying over England
is exploded by a hijacker's bomb, and two men, amazingly, survive. The
first is Gibreel Farishta, one of India's biggest movie stars, who has
made a fortune playing the subcontinent's deities in the popular genre
films known as theologicals. The second is Saladin Chamcha, a radio
celebrity known as 'the Man of a Thousand Voices and a Voice.' They
fall to earth, believing themselves dead, only to discover that they're
very much alive - though in decidedly changed form. Gibreel has
sprouted a halo, while Saladin has grown horns and a tail. In
the wake of the accident, Gibreel comes to believe that he is really
the archangel Gabriel, a heavenly messenger sent by God to redeem the
fallen city of London. He wanders the streets searching for lost souls,
and he falls prey to strange dreams. One dream - and this is the one
that has reportedly upset Muslim leaders -concerns Mahound, a
businessman turned prophet, who preaches to Jahilia, a city built
entirely of sand. A second dream features an orphan girl by the name of
Ayesha who walks in a cloud of butterflies and leads the faithful on a
difficult pilgrimage. Friends force Gibreel to accept the fact that
he's mentally unbalanced, and they persuade him to return to work in
the movies. This time he is to play the archangel himself, a role that
enables Mr. Rushdie to build several additional halls of mirrors in his
narrative. There is something personal and touching about Saladin's search for
his misplaced self. The scenes in which he visits a former Indian
girlfriend and his dying father possess an immediacy and emotional
power that's missing in the rest of this sprawling book; and his
attempts to come to terms with the cultural and
social dislocations
wrought by his self-invention perfectly encapsulate the novel's central
theme of metamorphosis. In fact, it often seems as though the bulk of
'The Satanic Verses' is an elaborate work of decoration embroidered
on top of Saladin's story - decoration that allows Mr. Rushdie to
engage, rather self-indulgently, in all manner of narrative
pyrotechnics. To be sure, some of his conjuring tricks are
magical: a couple of Gibreel's dreams have the inventiveness of the
tales told by Scheherazade; and several of his and Saladin's
adventures, as an angel and devil wandering the streethe fierce visionary power that gave 'Midnight's
Children' such an organic, inclusive feel. As a result, the reader
frequently suspects that in this volume, Mr. Rushdie is simply using
the freedom conferred by magical realism as a license to avoid
recounting a more straightforward tale. There is a fine story
somewhere in this volume - that of Saladin and his attempts to define a
self that might embrace both the present and the past - but it doesn't
take 500-plus pages to tell.GET THIS BOOK FREE.BUY SELL RENT BOOKS FROM THE LINK BELOW.
More reviews about the The Satanic Verses