Rushdie in Wonderland

...In addition, there is a brothel whose residents not only take the names of the prophet's wives but assume their identities...

...Although I was nearly always entertained by the tumultuous goings-on in The Satanic Verses, I was rarely deeply moved...

...The book is so crammed with writerly displays that reading it is a little like watching a hyperactive magician on stage: One can almost hear the wizard saying, "Watch, now I am about to do something tricky with my hands.' Rushdie candidly says in an Acknowledgment at the end, "The identities of the authors from whom I've learned will, I hope, be clear from the text.' Most are...

...The result is a sort of portmanteau novel: Everything is packed into it, from pop songs to television scripts to Bombay slang to Oxbridge rhetoric, in a dazzling, sometimes stupefying, bazaar of idioms...

...Saladin, meanwhile, develops a goatish, hairy body and seems initially to incarnate the devil...

...Still, it will reward any reader willing to give it the benefit of some fairly regular doubts...

...They are, rather, part of a deliberate strategy, as if Rushdie believed he might solve the problem of his own internal partition by bringing together all the voices, loved and hated, that he hears in his bicontinental world...

...As they descend through the clouds they are in a manner reborn, and this book is the tale of their adventures, first in Rushdie's phantasmagorical London and eventually back in Bombay...

...Showing up at the front door of his passionate love, the mountaineer Alleluia Cone, conqueror of Everest, he begins to pursue her anew...

...He is arrested as an illegal alien, escapes a detention center, returns home to find his wife in bed with his best friend, and moves in with an Indian family in a London slum where his horns and pelt provoke a variety of contrary responses...

...He then starts to lose his mind in earnest and becomes the victim of a series of hallucinatory dreams that periodically take over the narrative: of a saintly Indian peasant girl covered in butterflies who leads her village on a pilgrimage to the sea...

...The other side of this linguistic richness, however, is the hubbub it creates in the reader's mind...

...I missed a sense of real people doing real things in a solid world...

...Too often, though, he undermines his essential story, and our involvement in it, with a forced irony and inventiveness that leave the reader impressed with the teller but indifferent to the tale...

...Reviewed by Alan Wade Fiction writer, free-lance critic '"To be born again, sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, 'first you have to die.'" So begins Salman Rushdie's controversial new novel, The Satanic Verses...

...And no one now writing in English brings a more varied arsenal of gifts to the handling of the language...

...Every reader will come up with a different list, but among the other authors I heard were Laurence Sterne, J.P...

...Gibreel's dream of the butterfly girl seems drawn almost straight from One Hundred Years of Solitude...

...We are forced to step back to contemplate it all, and that prevents us from getting as involved in the fates of Gibreel and Saladin as we otherwise might...

...Similarly, Rushdie shares Vladimir Nabokov's love of silly neologisms and puns...

...Salman, doubting the divine origin of the revelations he is taking down, adds a few of his own words that the prophet does not at first notice...

...The two main characters represent good and evil, but a compromised good and evil: The "archangel" Gibreel acts in a manner that is not far from criminal, whereas the "devil" Saladin, because of his metamorphosis, is more sinned against than sinning, despite his resentment of Gibreel and his plotting a terrible revenge...

...Indeed, when the narrator writes of her peasant neighbors, "few of mem dreamed more than once a month on account of being too poor to afford such luxuries, " it is hard to believe Gabriel Garcia Marquez did not dictate the line...

...The plot—if so trim a word can be applied to Rushdie's sprawl of stories—is an interweaving of the trials of Saladin and Gibreel with Gibreel's messianic dreams...

...I felt, ultimately, the same weariness reading The Satanic Verses as I did reading Helprin's Win ter's Tale: The invention began to seem gratuitous...

...Rushdie seems to have taken as a recipe Nabokov's claim that every great novel is a fairy tale, and he has written, if not agreat novel, then atleast a grand and fantastical fairy tale...

...The book disappoints as well because of the high expectations aroused by the author's Shame and, especially, Midnight's Children...

...Even at his most fantastic, Marquez always anchors his stories in his characters' emotions, which he makes so vivid to us that we willingly suspend our disbelief...

...But it all might have worked better for me had the underlying story and the prose gotten their feet nearer the ground more often...

...A terrorist's bomb has exploded in a plane over the English Channel...

...Gibreel the archangel—who is Gibreel the insane actor—claims credit for the good and bad verses...

...No character is too small to have his frenzied moment of display, no slang is too trite or silly to find its place in a jam-packed sentence, alongside, and contributing to, language of great elegance and beauty...

...It's as though the voices of the entire British Commonwealth were contained in a single book...

...and of a prophet named Mahound and the religion he founds...

...The problem is that The Satanic Verses is not as deeply felt as Rushdie's earlier novels, and its reach greatly exceeds its grasp...

...Gibreel, superstar portrayer of gods in the Bombay cinema, and Saladin Chamchawala, an English-educated voice-over actor, fall like Alice—not to their deaths but instead to a wonderland that in their case is present-day London...

...of a mad and bitter Khomeini-like Imam cloistered in a London flat...

...At times Rushdie achieves that emotional density: in the account of Saladin's estrangement from and rapprochement with his father, for example, or of Gibreel's doomed affair with Alleluia Cone, the improbably named mountain climber...

...This parallels a story about the prophet Mohammed, to whom Satan is said to have dictated some false verses of the Koran...

...The verbal mixture embodies Saladin's (and the author's) dilemma of being from the East and now living in the West, and of trying to make the two realms cohere in his head as they obviously do not in a fractured world...

...These echoes are not the embarrassing signs of a writer unable to master his reading (though there's a borrowed quality about some of them...

...Yet like his contemporary Mark Helprin, and unlike Marquez and the best of the South American magic realists, Rushdie is more interested in the magic than in the realism and the novel suffers for it...

...Donleavy, Tom Stoppard, LB...

...The strength of the work, in fact, is its all-inclusiveness...

...It is the dream about the desert prophet Mahound and his amanuensis Salman—actually a rather minor part of the novel—that has angered Muslims around the world...

...The reader is never encouraged to feel too sure of where he is or where he's going, and I began to feel an immigrant myself, like the characters and the author, in the turbulent new universe of this book...

...The prose itself, vaguely evoking Ulysses, is also a kind of summary of contemporary styles of English...

...The project is as ambitious and exciting as that of any living writer...

...The constant clashing of idioms, vulgar and orotund, Eastern and Western, produces a sense of dislocation that is clearly intended...

...Singer and Italo Calvino...

...He has been attempting to create a single homeland of the imagination out of the Indian and English worlds that clash so violently in his pages...

...Gibreel walks away from the accident with a strange glow about his head and delusions of being God's chief archangel...

...Dragged into this not-quite Manichean struggle are a host of other issues, including Thatcher's new England, Islamic fundamentalism, racism, sexual obsession, the clashing of Eastern and Western cultures, and the false values of world cinema...