The Satanic Verses
Salman Rushdie's most controversial novel opens with a miracle and a fall: two Indian actors, Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, plummet from a hijacked jumbo jet that explodes high above the English Channel — and survive. As they wash ashore on the English coast, they find themselves strangely transformed. Gibreel takes on the aura of an archangel; Saladin sprouts horns and hooves, remade as a devil. So begins a sprawling, exuberant fable about migration, belonging, and the war between the sacred and the profane.
As the two men make their way through a hostile, immigrant London, Gibreel is plagued by increasingly vivid dreams — among them a sequence that reimagines the founding of a great religion in a desert city, and the prophet at its center. It is these dream chapters, and their treatment of faith, that ignited a global firestorm on the book's 1988 publication.
Ambitious, funny, and formally daring, The Satanic Verses is a landmark of magical realism about identity, doubt, and the immigrant experience of being caught between worlds.
A Bollywood star who survives the fall and takes on the aura of an archangel, tormented by prophetic dreams.
An anglicized voice actor who survives the fall transformed into a devil-like figure.