The Book That Made Rushdie a Marked Man

Two men fall out of an exploding plane and land in England, sort of themselves

Here’s the setup, and it’s a genuinely great one: Gibreel Farishta, a Bollywood superstar known for playing Hindu gods, and Saladin Chamcha, an Anglophile voice actor who has spent his whole life trying to sound more English than the English, are on a hijacked plane that blows up over the English Channel. They fall for what feels like pages, singing to each other, and land on a beach near Hastings, alive, transformed. Gibreel starts sprouting a halo. Saladin starts sprouting horns, hooves, and a tail. One becomes an angel, more or less. One becomes something the tabloids and the immigration police are very happy to call a devil.

From there the novel splits into rivers that keep crossing each other: Saladin’s grotesque, very funny, very bitter odyssey through Thatcher-era London as an actual demon nobody quite notices is a demon; Gibreel’s slow unraveling into religious delusion and jealousy; and, woven through both, dream sequences where Gibreel becomes a prophet-figure presiding over the founding of a new religion in a city called Jahilia, which is Mecca in a funhouse mirror, and where a poet gets tricked into slipping a few compromising verses into the revelation before an angel makes him take them back. That last part is, obviously, the part that got a country’s worth of clerics and one very serious Ayatollah extremely upset. I’ll get to that. But the plot description underselling the actual experience of reading it is basically the whole review in miniature.

Genius sentences, chaotic scaffolding, and my own possibly bad taste

Look, I need to say the good part first because it’s real and it’s substantial. Rushdie writes with a kind of drunk exuberance that I have never encountered anywhere else. He’ll take a single image, Saladin’s devil-transformation in a detention hospital full of other migrants who have also sprouted tails and horns and snake bodies, and turn it into the sharpest, funniest, angriest metaphor for how England treats immigrants that I’ve read in any novel from any decade. “They have the power of description, and we succumb to the pictures they construct,” one character says, more or less, and that line alone justifies an entire chapter of slog. The prose is playful in a way that reminded me of a friend who talks too fast because his brain is generating puns faster than his mouth can deliver them, and about half the time that’s thrilling and about half the time I wanted to grab him by the shoulders and say, mate, breathe.

Because here’s my real criticism, and I think it’s fair: this book is a mess. Not a controlled, ambitious, sprawling mess like Midnight’s Children, which I love without reservation. A genuine mess, where entire sections (the Ayesha pilgrimage plot, the Imam-in-exile chapter) feel like they wandered in from a different, less interesting novel and never quite earned their real estate. I put the book down for four days somewhere around the two-hundred-page mark, not because I was offended, but because I was bored, which felt like a strange thing to admit about the most dangerous novel of the twentieth century. I kept asking myself if I was missing something, if my attention span had been ruined by scrolling, if a more patient reader would see the architecture I couldn’t. Maybe. I’ve read it twice now and I still think a third of it could be cut with no loss.

And then it does something like the Rosa Diamond sequence, this elderly Englishwoman on the beach who mistakes the fallen Saladin for a figure from her own colonial memories in Argentina, and I remember why people call Rushdie one of the great sentence-level writers of his generation. The tangent I can’t let go of: I read somewhere that Rushdie wrote most of this while genuinely unaware of the storm it would cause, that he thought of it as a comic novel about migration and hybrid identity first and a provocation second, if at all. Whether or not that’s exactly true, it tracks with how the book reads: it feels less like a calculated blasphemy than like a writer who forgot to look up from his own imagination long enough to notice he was standing in a minefield.

The novel’s real subject isn’t religion at all. It’s the unbearable, funny, violent work of becoming a new person in a country that never asked you to come.

About Salman Rushdie

Rushdie was a Bombay-born, Cambridge-educated advertising copywriter (he coined “irresistibubble” for a chocolate bar, a fact I find delightful) before Midnight’s Children made him famous and this book made him infamous. In 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for his death over the novel’s dream sequences, and Rushdie spent close to a decade in hiding under British police protection, moving addresses constantly, publishing under a joint pseudonym at one low point. He kept writing anyway, kept doing interviews, kept insisting on the right to write exactly this kind of book. In 2022 he was attacked and severely injured onstage in New York, losing sight in one eye, by a man who’d apparently never read past the controversy. He wrote a memoir about it, Knife, that is somehow both harrowing and stubbornly funny, which tells you everything about the kind of writer he’s always been.

If this wrecked (or exhausted) you, read these next

• Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie, same voice and ambition but a tighter, more satisfying spine
• The Moor’s Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie, for more of that maximalist family-saga sprawl done slightly more coherently
• Shame by Rushdie, shorter and meaner, a good entry point if this one exhausted you
• The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi, for the same immigrant-identity comedy with a lot less mythology weighing it down

You can find a copy here: The Satanic Verses on Amazon.

For your book club

1. Does the novel’s structure (two men, two timelines, dream sequences bleeding into reality) hold together for you, or does it collapse under its own ambition?
2. Saladin becomes a literal devil and Gibreel a literal angel. What is the book actually saying about which immigrants get called which?
3. Does knowing the real-world consequences of this book change how you read the Jahilia dream sequences, and should it?
4. Is Gibreel’s descent into religious madness a tragedy, a warning, or something closer to satire?
5. Rushdie has said the book is really about migration and hybridity, not religion. Do you buy that, given what’s actually on the page?