Salman Rushdie’s Satanic
Verses is not an easy book to review. After finishing any book, the reviewing
process is always an excellent way of clarifying what, if anything, the
particular work may have communicated. With a book like Satanic Verses,
however, as with any book as famous, or infamous as this, does one review the
book itself or does one review the reaction to the book? Is it possible to
review the book without reviewing the reviews? Is there any need to describe
the book itself, when it is this well known, or should one concentrate on
judging the allegations levelled against it? Should one actually merely ignore
the content and deal only with the reaction?
Of course, there are
questions that are present throughout the process. They simply cannot be
ignored. Satanic Verses is no longer a book that can be approached without prejudice,
bias or both. So let this reader state as an initial position that he has
always been convinced that freedom of speech always trumps claims of offense,
but also that freedom of speech is not a freedom that should deliberately seek
to offend, attack or coerce. All lines are fine, as long as they are travelled
to reach a destination and not attack it. Literature, like all art, is in the
journey, not the end state.
But I am reading Satanic
Verses for the first time… I always wanted to read it but shied away for years.
I was not afraid of controversy, but I was living in Islamic states and copies
of the book were not welcome. This is what we call censorship and I am supposed
to oppose it. I am now curious, more than motivated to read it, curious to identify
exactly what might have caused offense. Personally, I regard religion as fair
game for any caricature or criticism. Religions have never fallen shy of
criticizing one another, after all. I have been an admirer of Rushdie’s work
since reading Midnight’s Children when it was hot off the press. I was also
resident in an Islamic state, one fundamentalist enough to have banned the sale
of all alcohol. That's the time when our college library removed all of
Rushdie’s work from its shelves because of Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa issued
just after Satanic Verses was published. That same college term during which I
sought Rushdie’s novel in the library, I borrowed and read The Place Of Dead
Roads by William Burroughs from the same library. I did point out to the librarians
what I had found early in the book and suggested that in the interest of
consistency it should also be removed from the library. I was duly informed
that it was Salman Rushdie who was banned (note the author, not the book) and
so the William Burroughs could stay. Opinion, or even offence, is rarely
consistent, and apparently never rational. I hereby find myself reviewing the
reaction to Satanic Verses, not the book itself.
Let it start. Satanic
Verses introduces its two principal characters in mid-air, as they fall from an
Everest-high aircraft that has just disintegrated in flight. Amazingly, they
survive their fall, but the novel would read just as well if they didn't, with
their lives flashing past dreamlike in the seconds that remain before they hit
the ground. Crucially they are both involved with mass media in the form of
film and television. One has starred in television dramas based on religious
epics. Now why aren't these considered disrespectful?
Like all complicated
people, they have lived complicated lives. They have bi-located between
contrasting geographical and cultural contradictions and have been at home
anywhere and everywhere. Cultural identity is at the core of this work and,
like the overall scenario, the concept and its perception are constantly
confused by those who receive cultural messages, interpret them and possibly
change them. We like to think of ourselves as rooted in our cultures,
backgrounds and identities, but these are in a state of constant change, cannot
be pinned down by description, let alone defined. Culturally, we are always
foreigners, whatever we choose as our convictions.
Stylistically, Satanic
Verses conforms to the author’s norm of magical realism. The word ‘norm’ is
problematic until we acknowledge Salman Rushdie’s own observation that this is
still ‘realism’. At the level of phrase, every sentence is a vivid and surreal
succession of images. Read slowly, these coalesce into a visible kaleidoscope
of constant change, where the reader can take nothing for granted, but will
want to absorb the experience in real time for merely what each moment brings.
Read quickly, and the print evaporates. It's the pictures that count, but they
are always fleeting images. Like life, they flash by.
Interspersed with this
hyper-reality are dream sequences in which characters whose existence is literal
but clearly invented enact film-like sequences that are not quite the religious
myths they mimic. Unlike the real characters, who are always vague and
negotiable, these caricatures act more like cardboard cut-outs. Here the tone
is more naturalistic, no less surreal, but a deal more comic. They seem like
the television version of the story that might feature our main protagonists
among the cast. And, like in the William Burroughs book mentioned earlier, most
religions get it squarely in the neck. Burroughs does it in three sentences,
whereas Rushdie is more thorough. And a good deal more comical. Where Burroughs
is bad-tempered and dismissive, Rushdie is ironic and sympathetic.
We soon learn that the
book’s title derives from particular suras, specific verses that have been
edited out of religious texts because they imply things that should not be
stated. Meanwhile our principal characters also seem to edit their own
identities to suit convenience, assumptions, advantage and aspiration. The
characters from religious myth thus seem to act in ways that are wholly similar
(not holy) to those of our real life, surreal television stars, film actors,
ne’er-do-wells and highly-strung narcissists. Just like the rest of us.
Long before the end, the
reader may start to feel punch drunk after being pummelled by combinations of
streamed images. Technicolor language and fantastical scenes. But at the end,
Satanic Verses presents such a vivid description of a particular character’s
experience that any reader will relive those moments for the rest of
terrestrial life. The adjective is irrelevant, by the way, since the book has
by then confirmed that the terrestrial is all there is to life.
Satanic Verses is thus a
meditation on what makes us feel, think and react. We are products of religion,
culture, myth, birth right, circumstance and experience, and everything else we
imagine. We take everything seriously, including the jokes, the fantasy and the
truth, which probably does not exist outside of opinion. We are as constant as
our whims and as solid as our dreams. This makes Satanic Verses hard to review.
It is an unforgettable experience, that like most myth, will be most vivid for
those who believe in its reality and enter into it. Those who stay outside of
its world simply don't get it. It’s a book full of questions, without answers,
with experiences along the road to the nowhere we inhabit.
No comments:
Post a Comment