An Explosive Reception

By Paul Gray

THE SATANIC VERSES by Salman Rushdie; Viking; 547 pages; $19.95

Occasionally, heartening evidence surfaces that some people still care about serious fiction after all. Here is a long, challenging novel by a highly praised writer, and it has spurred a frenzy of international attention. Headlines have bristled. Voices have been raised, although not exactly in unanimous praise. The book has been banned in a number of countries with substantial Muslim populations; its appearance in the West has been greeted with isolated public protests and telephoned bomb threats.

It must be added that few of those outraged by The Satanic Verses have ever seen it, much less opened it. Their fury, and the timorousness of government officials fearing violent uproars, has been prompted by one accusation: that the novel contains a blasphemous portrait of the Prophet Muhammad and thus amounts to a terrible insult to Islam. The plain, simple truth is that the novel does nothing of the sort, but only those who consent to read the thing will discover this for themselves.

If all the hubbub, with its attendant free publicity, increases the audience for The Satanic Verses, so much the better. The book is both an Arabian Nights narrative enchantment and a vast rumination on history, on the clash of cultures and individuals, and on the beliefs that people cherish for comfort and salvation. Author Salman Rushdie, 41, who was born in Bombay and educated at Cambridge, shows every sign of disproving Kipling's bromide about East, West and the twain never meeting. They have met, all right, in his experience and imagination, with results that are alternately comic, poignant and explosive.

The novel, in fact, begins with a big bang: the blowing up, by Sikh terrorists, of a jumbo jet, Flight AI-420 from Bombay to London, at 29,002 feet over the English Channel. Two passengers, cartwheeling and conversing, plummet earthward. One is Gibreel Farishta, India's most popular movie star, who is in disguise and fleeing his fame after suffering a life-threatening illness and discovering in the process that there is no God. The other is Saladin Chamcha, a prosperous performer of voice-overs for commercials on British television, returning to his adopted land after a melancholy visit to Bombay and the haunts of his childhood. Miraculously -- preposterously -- they both survive their descent. And then truly strange things begin to happen.

Saladin sprouts a pair of horns on his forehead and cloven hoofs; these mutations earn him, a British subject, rough handling by police and immigration officials. Gibreel develops a visible arc of light, a halo, around his head, and must cope with the awestruck reverence of perfect strangers. His new radiance aggravates an older problem, particularly puzzling in light of his newfound atheism: his vivid cinematic dreams, in which he is cast as the Archangel Gibreel, but without a script, and then asked by a series of petitioners to deliver Allah's word.

It is one of these -- a businessman named Mahound -- who has settled Rushdie's mulligatawny as far as Islamic fundamentalists are concerned. For the Gibreel-Mahound exchanges are based, in an obviously distorted and hallucinatory manner, on an episode in the life of Muhammad: the Prophet's early willingness to include in the Qur'an an acknowledgment of three female deities and his later repudiation of these verses as satanically inspired. If Muhammad himself was willing to admit that he had been deceived, it is difficult to see why a tangential, fictional version of this long-ago event should cause such contemporary furor.

For someone outside the faith to lecture Muslims on what they should or should not read would be impudent. But it must also be stated that there is no ridicule or harm in this novel, only an overwhelming sense of amazement and joy at the multifariousness of all Allah's children. As Gibreel and Saladin try to make their afflicted ways through contemporary London, a fascinating tapestry unfurls behind them. This backdrop contains vivid scenes -- among them, the subjugation of an immense subcontinent and ancient cultures by an upstart island, and the upheavals that result when this thralldom is abruptly ended. But the history is parceled out in telling, individual details, people and places caught up in a grand design of which they are innocent and that, in the long run, may turn out to be simply chaos.

That possibility of meaninglessness tantalizes and bedevils throughout the novel. But Rushdie's furious, organizing energy seems to mark him as an angel of coherence. He has obviously read his Garcia Marquez, his Joyce, his Thomas Pynchon. He shares with those authors the desire to assemble everything he has known and seen and make it all fit together, beautifully. In his fourth novel, Rushdie has done just that.