Novel: The Satanic Verses

Overview
Salman Rushdie follows two Indian expatriates whose lives collide in a single catastrophic moment and then diverge into a series of shapeshifting reveries and social confrontations. Gibreel Farishta, a Bollywood star famous for playing gods, and Saladin Chamcha, a London-based voiceover artist, survive a midair terrorist explosion and return to an England in which bodies and identities no longer behave as expected. Their transformations, Gibreel assuming angelic hallucinations and Saladin becoming grotesquely altered, set the stage for a novel that moves between urban satire and mythic dreamscape.
The narrative interweaves the pair's waking experiences in contemporary London with richly imagined visionary episodes that rework religious history and personal memory. Dream logic, comic satire and moments of brutal realism coexist as Rushdie probes the costs of exile, the instability of belief, and the strange enactments of public fame and private shame.

Plot and structure
The novel opens with the fall from the sky and then circles through a non-linear architecture of flashbacks, dream sequences and parable-like digressions. One strand follows Saladin's efforts to make himself "English", his estrangement from his family, the racism he encounters, and the humiliations that result from his altered appearance. The other follows Gibreel's descent into fevered visions in which he relives mythic tableaux and encounters angelic visitations, blurring the boundary between actor and apparition.
Interspersed with these contemporary strands are retellings of an early Muslim history, rendered as a series of theatrical, allegorical vignettes that question how sacred narratives are formed and transmitted. The famous episode that gives the novel its title appears as a contested, imaginative reconstruction of revelation, temptation and compromise, and it functions as a focal point for the book's exploration of authorial responsibility and the power of stories to wound or to heal.

Main characters
Gibreel Farishta is charismatic, fragile and prone to visions; his celebrity is both armor and trap, and his mythic fantasies often substitute for a coherent self. Saladin Chamcha is cautious, brittle and ruthlessly self-aware; his metamorphosis exposes the precariousness of assimilation and the violence of a society that demands easy identities. Their friendship, rivalry and eventual estrangement form the emotional core of the novel.
Supporting figures appear in episodic, sometimes hallucinatory sequences that range from comic to tragic. Villagers, pilgrims, agents of the British state and tabloid journalists populate the novel's crowded stages, each serving as a mirror to the protagonists' crises of faith and belonging.

Themes
Identity and metamorphosis run through the book as both literal events and metaphors for immigrant experience. Questions of faith, apostasy, and the authority of sacred texts are dramatized through Rushdie's imaginative reconstructions, which unsettle fixed narratives and insist on the provisional nature of all stories. The novel interrogates the costs of uprooting, how language, memory and national mythologies contend when people cross cultural borders.
Satire and compassion coexist: the text lampoons British institutions, celebrity culture and reactionary politics while also portraying deep human loneliness and longing. The interplay of the comic and the melancholic keeps moral and emotional judgments complex rather than didactic.

Style and reception
Rushdie's prose ranges from baroque exuberance to sardonic clarity, employing magical realism, pastiche and metafictional play to sustain a volatile tone. Structural daring and linguistic inventiveness create a novel that is both theatrical and intimate, irreverent and humane.
Upon publication the book provoked intense controversy for its imaginative reworking of religious history, prompting protests and a severe political backlash. Beyond the dispute, it has been widely read as a landmark of late-20th-century fiction: provocative, richly textured and deeply concerned with the tangled business of storytelling, exile and the right to invent.