'THE SATANIC VERSES'

AUTHOR: Salman Rushdie

PUBLISHER: Viking

Being a child of Hip-Hop, I'm also a child of the 1980's. That's right, I came up during that accursed time of rampant Reaganomics, proliferating crack rocks, the looming specter of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, and most pertinent to this book review, the media-bred boogieman of Islamic fundamentalism. If, like me, you were also alive during the latter half of the 80's you should no-doubt remember the media circus surrounding the release of Salman Rushdie's novel 'The Satanic Verses' and the fire-storm it elicited from fundamentalist Muslim clerics the world over, not the least of which being the Iranian Ayatollah Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini who went so far as to put up a reward for the assassination of the author. If, like me, you were also about 9 or 10 years old at the time you probably never got around to actually reading the book since such sure-to-be boring literary fare and the socio-religious politics of its critics were far less interesting to you than the animated adventures of He-Man and The Transformers.

Well, who would've known we were all going to grow up to be twentysomething Hip-Hop heads infatuated not only with books but with politics and world religions? Surely not I! And surely none of us would've thought—even in our worst nightmares—that the idiot son of the then-vice president would one day perpetrate a bloodless coup in order to install himself as dictator-cum-President of these United States, only to resurrect that same boogieman of Islamic fundamentalism again in the form of one Osama bin Laden! Or would we? Well, regardless of what you, I, or anyone else thought, one fact remains; Salman Rushdie's once-maligned novel is damn good, even if it can have the tendency to be as literarily convoluted as the introduction I've just written for this review.

At the core of 'The Satanic Verses' are the characters Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha; both actors of Indian descent, both named after legendary personages of the Islamic world. Both characters are haunted by demons of the deeply embedded religious and cultural traditions of India, though in quite different ways. Whereas Gibreel embraces, however speciously, the hodgepodge of religions and mythologies present in the subcontinent by becoming a star of Indian "theological" movies, Saladin shuns all things Indian and moves to England, only to be typecast and looked over for work due to his not-so-popular "ethnic" appearance in a lily-white Anglo Saxon society. Despite appearances though, neither of them truly deal with their personal issues relating to their connection—or disconnection as it were—with their native culture and society. It is this which in the end proves disastrous for them in more ways than one, as they are lead down paths of confusion, desire, loneliness, anger and despair into a series of most unlikely circumstances where the primordial powers of good and evil battle for their very minds, bodies and souls.

Moving from incredible sadness to utter hilarity, sublime cultural commentary to asinine pop-culture references, Rushdie takes his characters, and readers, on quite a roller-coaster ride, where the psychological, emotional, spiritual and even supernatural combine in a vast array of pretzel-like twists and turns. Indeed, some readers may be confused by the plot, which is told in a piecemeal fashion with flashbacks, forward leaps and side-tracks aplenty, as well as the storyteller's penchant for heavily stylized dialogue, incorporating big doses of slanguage, purposeful misspellings and other nonsensical gibberish that took some getting used to even for me. With such an unusual story, and method of telling it, the book definitely requires your attention, but you will be rewarded handsomely for it as the tale is quite satisfying in both the style and substance departments.

Though often bizarre, 'The Satanic Verses' works on so many levels and should be enjoyable for anyone willing to take a more magical look at our modern world where ancient cultures and pop-iconography blend and sometimes clash in a truly unique, but completely true-to-life meeting of the sacred and profane.