Late review: The Satanic Verses 

The blurb on the back of this book tells you that a hijacked plane blows up mid-air over England and two Indian celebrities, Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, miraculously survive. But they then must take sides in the eternal struggle between good and evil. But at whose behest? Well, cutting to the chase, I’m buggered if I know.

Boris Johnson once joked on BBC Question Time at the time the bearded censors of Islam issued their fatwa on the author Salman Rushdie, that he would have issued one based on literary merit, har har! Well, nobody is laughing now because one especially mad lunatic from the Middle Ages of contemporary Islam nearly succeeded thirty years later. Sir Salman is now sans one eye and the use of one hand as a result. So we may assume that the efforts of these brain-washed and brain-dead bastards are not over; he still lives.

But back to the book. I recall being horrified at the time of the initial fatwa but, apart from the lunatics who ended up running the asylum in Iran, we were completely unaware that a few decades on, radical Islam in any of its hydra-headed excrescences had tentacles that would stretch across the world. I was equally horrified, long after we naively thought the fatwa had been called off, to hear of the barbaric attack on Rushdie in New York. I had neither read nor owned a copy of the book, but I immediately bought one as a kind of inverse virtue signalling show of solidarity with the man. I pinned it to my Twitter profile and to Hell with any offence caused to my many Muslim followers.

Lest anyone is unaware what the fuss was about, the book was deemed offensive to Muslims due to its mention of the so-called ‘Satanic verses.’ These, allegedly, were verses omitted from The Koran which referred to how The Prophet Muhammed had been tempted by Satan. But the mad Ayatollah who was running Iran at the time, and who appointed himself international arbiter of what was acceptable in relation to Islam, decided that it was the duty of all Muslims worldwide to kill Salman Rushdie. What could possibly go wrong? That the person may well die in the attempt was a bonus as they would be a martyr, go direct to Muslim Heaven and have virgins lined up to satisfy his every need (I’ve always been curious what happens when he runs out of virgins, but maybe that’s just me).

As someone who does not believe a word of The Koran in the first place, apart from the derivative material, and find its essential downgrading of Jesus to the status of a mere prophet unbelievably offensive, I could not give a flying fox about anything that was left on the cutting room floor. The real laugh is that the offending verses are only mentioned in passing in the text, and the context of the reference (like most of the book) was lost on me. Why Rushdie decided to title the book The Satanic Verses in the first place is a mystery. And had those fuzzy faced fanatics in Iran not got the hump under their turbans then the world would have been none the wiser. They presumably had no idea how the whole world would come to know what the verses were about. Bet they feel pretty stoopid now!

The book! This must be one of the worst I have ever read. It has absolutely no redeeming features. The only saving grace would have been if it had been shorter. I had heard it was ‘hard-going’ so imagine my disappointment when it arrived. I am no stranger to mighty tomes. In the process of reading ‘the verses’, I read the much bigger Nights of Plague by Orhan Pamuk; I read the old single volume Lord of The Rings as a teenager and later War and Peace. I say that I read Pamuk’s magnum opus during the time I was reading ‘the verses.’ I read many other books during this time and, to tell the truth, I considered suicide several times rather than return to Rushdie. But I persevered.

The book is written in an ultra-magical realist style. Normally I have no problem with this genre. I struggled a bit with Pamuk’s My Name is Red—a pleasure compared with ‘the verses’ but thoroughly enjoyed Elif Shafak’s The Forty Rules of Love. Interestingly, in addition to the genre, Shafak’s book used the same device as used by Louis de Bernières in Captain Corelli’s Mandolin and John Fowles in The French Lieutenant’s Woman of alternating chapters whereby you could, effectively, read two separate stories within the same novel. Sadly, there was no such succour in ‘the verses’ which is, to put it mildly, a jumble of chapters and sections within chapters which have no thread, the vast majority of which make absolutely no sense. King Lear, we always learned at school, had ‘intermittent periods of lucidity’. No such luck in The Satanic Verses and at some points the text could simply have been repeated verses from Bananas in Pyjamas. Perhaps the reader is meant to start at the end and work backwards, but I’ll never know; I could not face picking it up again.

The only narrative (a term that only loosely applies here) points that I can relate is that these two chaps fall from the sky, one becomes an angel and the other a goat. They make the occasional appearance throughout the book in the process of which we are treated to the salacious details of various sexual encounters (so there is some light relief) and other random occurrences. Someone—a woman—climbs Everest. There is a ripper murderer on the loose somewhere who specialises in killing older ladies and arranging their organs around their bodies and…nothing else to report. The only quasi-coherent chapter is the penultimate one, where we are promised the parting of the Arabian sea for a motley collection of pilgrims going to Mecca. They march into the sea expecting it to part and reach the coastal shelf with their heads above water, after which all the gullible idiots fall off the shelf and are never seen again.

My advice if you are ever tempted to pick up The Satanic Verses is don’t. I have lost many hours of my elderly life which I shall never get back again. I am unenlightened, did not laugh once and had an anxiety attack each time I thought about it. However, as an afternote, I just read a short story by Rushdie in The New Yorker which, while the magical realism was to the fore, was an enjoyable and coherent piece. The man can write, maybe he just needed some practice.

Roger Watson is a retired academic, editor and writer. He is a columnist with Unity News Network and writes regularly for a range of conservative journals including The Salisbury Review and The European Conservative. He has travelled and worked extensively in the Far East and the Middle East. He lives in Kingston upon Hull, UK.