The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie

 

The novel opens with an airplane crash, probably a terrorist bombing.  The passengers are thrown out into the air, to plummet to the sea and die.  All but two passengers.  Those two, both Indian actors, are named Gibreel and Saladin.  They clutch each other, spiraling downward and somehow through their combined efforts, they survive.  But they are not the same.  They are two sides of the coin, evil and good.

After the wreck, each becomes an extreme example of one side or the other.  Gibreel becomes an angel, Gabriel specifically, and has visions of what the world will become.  Saladin becomes the embodiment of evil, an actual devil with horns and hooves.  Each is still tied to the other, any win of one is mirrored with a loss of the other.  

Each mirrors each other in other ways.  Each is in love with an English woman while an Indian love beckons them from afar.  Each has issues with their fathers and with reconciling their native country and cultural backgrounds with the experiences of being an immigrant and trying to fit in and be successful in a different culture.  Each must find a way to handle their issues in order to move forward, although this may require them to be in a lifelong battle with the other.  

This novel was written in 1988.  What most people know about it is that it is the novel that ended with Rushdie being put under fatwa or death sentence by the Islamic faith.  That forced him into years of seclusion having to live his life and write under constant police guard.  The portions of the novel that caused the trouble is a small portion that claims to be Indian legend about how the Koran was written and the role of three female Indian goddesses in it.  I don't know the culture or history well enough to know if this is indeed a legend or something Rushdie made up.  

What is clear, however, is the wonder of this novel.  It is full of characters, each of whom's life story is set out.  It is full of miracles and horrible deeds, of the interplay of good and evil, the constant battle to see which will emerge successful in their conflict.  It is full of magic realism, of a torrent of words that carry the reader along, of all the wonderful ways that Rushdie engages with his readers.  It won the Whitbread Prize.  This novel is recommended for readers of literary fiction.