Is This the Real Life?

For those of you who follow this author's blog posts religiously (pun!), you will undoubtedly recall that one of my goals this year was to read this particular classic. So, regardless of how many books I finish (and I sadly seem to be on pace for 40 again), I guess I fulfilled this particular goal. The two Rushdie books I had read previously (Midnight's Children and The Ground Beneath Her Feet) are amongst my favorite novels of all time, and I had been planning to read what I believe is considered his opus, the book for which the Muslim world threatened to kill him, for some time. My favorite thing about Rushdie's works is that he takes magical realism to a higher level than most...some really fantastical things (like a man turning into a hooved, horned, goat-visaged demon incarnate in the top flat of a London apartment building) are taken as reality and almost commonplace, while at the same time they are able to be read as metaphor, if that makes sense. A transformation like that, or the two protagonists surviving a plane crash, or the preponderance of dead people walking and talking in the novel, are clearly metaphorical and may not actually be happening, but if they are happening, they are simply a part of the world, and are accepted as par for the course of events for the characters they are happening to. Somehow, simultaneously, these are miraculous, life altering events in the book, while also being something that everyone accepts without question.

The Satanic Verses follows two men, two actors, Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha. Gibreel, named for the angel (nee Gabriel), is the biggest star in India, most famous for playing religious figures in massive Bollywood productions, but gives it all up to follow Alleluia Cone, female conquerer of Mt. Everest, and the love of his life. Chamcha is an Indian who has made his life in London, and is most famous as being a "Man of 1,000 voices", his accents landing him the part of the main alien on a children's show. The two men happen to meet each other on an intercontinental flight from India back to London (Chamcha's home, and where Gibreel expects to find Allie), which is hijacked and subsequently blown up by Canadian extremists. Gibreel and Saladin fall through the air together and land on the coast of England together, unharmed, but changed. Gibreel begins to believe in dreams he's been long plagued by, dreams that he is the archangel Gibreel, dispensing advice and god's word to various Muslim prophets through the ages. Chamcha begins to sprout hair, hooves, and horns, and believes himself the walking embodiment of Shaitan, and Gibreel's nemesis. The book jumps back and forth between their present (post-London and post-transformation), their past (Chamcha's father in India, Gibreel's doomed love affair with a woman whose ghost will haunt him throughout the book), and the dreamscapes in which Gibreel is GIBREEL, angel (these passages most likely being responsible for the eventual fatwa) until it ends in tragedy and perhaps redemption, back in India.

I love Rushdie's writing. his books are long, full of digressions, philosophy, intertwining narratives, and meta-narrational asides, but they are beautiful written, funny, witty, pop cultural, and thought provoking. While I didn't love it as much as the previous two, perhaps because of how heavily it trafficked in Muslim and Hindu mythologies (which I find fascinating but am not particularly well-versed in, as opposed to the rock n roll and Greek mythologies of Ground Beneath Her Feet) it is an incredible novel, beginning to end. It also is now linked, not unfavorably, in my mind with another philosophy and mythology heavy, magically real, epic story: Lost. They both ask similar questions about miracles, survival, identity, the nature of evil, and fate vs. free will. I recommend both, obviously