The Satanic Verses

Literary fiction · Magical realism · Satire · Tragicomedy

First published: 1988
Print length: 576 pagesRandom House Trade Paperbacks, 2008

Costa Book Awards, 1988

Description

Bollywood star Gibreel Farishta and assimilated voice artist Saladin Chamcha are aboard a hijacked flight from India to Britain when the plane explodes over the English Channel. They survive an impossible fall, but their transformations are equally strange: Gibreel develops angelic qualities, while Saladin becomes physically devil-like. In contemporary England, Saladin is brutalized by police who suspect him of being an undocumented immigrant, and both men try to reconstruct lives warped by metamorphosis, resentment, and exile. Their conflict unfolds amid mounting tensions between London’s immigrant communities and the authorities, while dreamlike narratives widen the novel’s imaginative terrain. Blending magical realism, satire, and contemporary history, the novel examines migration, cultural identity, religious belief, and the unstable boundary between revelation and delusion.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Dense · Experimental · Lyrical · Ornate

Pace

Variable

Tone

Irreverent · Philosophical · Satirical · Unsettling

Structure

Braided · Framed · Nonlinear

Focus

Character · Ideas · Voice

Emotional intensity

4 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 5 / 5
Ideas: 5 / 5
Structure: 5 / 5
Background knowledge: 4 / 5

Themes

BelongingIdentityKnowledge and truthMigration and displacementRace and racismReligion and faith

About Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie is an Indian-born British and American novelist whose fiction brings magical transformations, political history, and comic invention into the same crowded frame. His novels often move between the Indian subcontinent and Britain, following migrants, divided families, and narrators who cannot separate private memory from public upheaval. The prose is typically dense, ornate, and quick with satire. Stories branch into dreams, fables, family chronicles, and competing versions of the past rather than advancing along a single straight line. In Midnight’s Children, Saleem Sinai recounts his life against independence and partition, making his unstable voice part of the contest over national history. The Satanic Verses expands that method through two survivors of an impossible fall whose bodily transformations unfold amid exile, police violence, religious belief, and immigrant tension in England. Rushdie can also compress these concerns into the clearer architecture of fantasy. Haroun and the Sea of Stories turns a child’s attempt to restore his father’s storytelling gift into a comic struggle over censorship, speech, and silence.

Midnight's Children Apple Books

Book details

For the print edition listed above.

Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Language: English
ISBN: 9780812976717

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