The novel opens with a hijacked jet exploding above the English Channel. Two passengers fall to earth alive: Gibreel Farishta, a Bombay film star famous for playing gods, and Saladin Chamcha, a voice actor who has worked hard to become English. In the days that follow Gibreel acquires a halo while Saladin sprouts horns and hooves, and both must make sense of what they have become in Thatcher-era London.
Interwoven with their story are Gibreel's dreams, which include a reimagining of the early days of a new religion in a desert city called Jahilia, a tale of a village that walks into the sea following a visionary girl, and an exiled cleric plotting revolution. These sequences, especially the treatment of a prophet named Mahound, led to the 1989 fatwa against Rushdie and years in hiding.
Read apart from the controversy, the book is about migration and the split self: what immigrants give up, how racism reshapes them, and whether a person can remake their identity without losing it. It won the Whitbread Novel Award in 1988 and was shortlisted for the Booker.
Book details
| Author | Salman Rushdie |
|---|---|
| First published | 1988 |
| Original language | English |
| Genre | Literary fiction |
| Type | Fiction |
| Pages (approx.) | 561 |
| Setting | London, Bombay and dream-worlds including the city of Jahilia, 1980s |
| Awards | Whitbread Novel Award 1988 |
Themes
- Migration
- Identity and transformation
- Faith and doubt
- Racism in britain
- Good and evil
Who should read it
Readers curious about the novel behind the fatwa who want a demanding satire of faith, celebrity and immigrant life.