If you are new to Rushdie, do yourself a favor and skip this book. I'd say start with "Midnight's Children," but his other books may be good entry points as well; whatever you choose, don't make "The Satanic Verses" your first Rushdie novel!

After the joy of reading the masterpiece that is "Midnight's Children," I was really excited about sinking my teeth into Salman Rushdie's most (in)famous book. Unfortunately, it turned out to be an utter mess.

Here's the crux of my problem with this shambles of a novel: Separate stories that re-use character names do not end up making a cohesive narrative world. If, like me, you get a ways into this book thinking, "Well, these separate storylines don't make sense now, but they must get tied up at the end," well, do yourself a favor and just put the book down. They don't.

For example, Rosa Diamond and her backstory were completely unnecessary. Her entrance was when I began to lose interest and think "this whole thing is not going to pan out in the end, is it?" I should have listened to that inner voice.

If Rushdie had wanted to write a satire of the life and times of Mohammed, he could have done it without the Farishta/Chamcha narrative as a frame. It is never established whether Gibreel's dreams were actually supposed to have happened in the physical world or not. And, in the end, it doesn't matter, because they have *absolutely* no impact on the framing story anyway.

The Ayatollah narrative is also completely unnecessary. I think in Rushdie's introduction to the 25th-anniversary edition of "Midnight's Children" he mentioned that putting in references to contemporary history would either strengthen the novel—giving it a certain timelessness—or weaken it with unnecessary "it was what was going on at the time" baggage. I think he was right about it strengthening "Midnight's Children," but the latter seems to be the case in "Verses." It's not fascinating satire or anything, it's just "oh, I think he's talking about Khomeini there."

And while I understand and appreciate magical realism, Rushdie used to it much better effect in "Midnight's Children." There, he used an unreliable narrator—it was always ambiguous whether the fantastical things that happened to him *actually* happened, or whether they were just the narrator's attempt at juicing things up. Not so in "Verses." (view spoiler)[While a lot of the magical elements could be explained in almost allegorical terms, there is no getting around the fact that Saladin Chamcha *actually* turns into a goat-like being in a police van and is made to eat the pellets of his own dung. This whole transformation is not only a bad analogy; its undeniable and unexplainable occurrence doesn't gibe with the rest of the fantastical events in the story (the rest of the events could be interpreted as allegorical). Saladin *really* grows horns. The story doesn't make sense otherwise. And then, the reverse transformation (back into a human) occurs without any real turning point in Sally Spoon's story—confusing and unsatisfying. Like many of the occurrences in the story, you get a feeling that it happened "just because." (hide spoiler)]

The sanitarium/asylum saga is unnecessary and the escaped beasts and "freaks" never factor into the story after the escape. What about the cracked-glass-skin-painfully-attached-to-flesh-within analogy? Rushdie spends a fair amount of time harping on it on multiple occasions, yet its purpose is never clear, and it, like the escaped freaks, just up and disappears from the novel after the hospital section.

Then there's the "what kind of idea are you" idea. Take Ayesha's march to the sea... she embodies the unyielding old-world-religion sort of idea. The bad: she encourages the stoning of a baby. The good: eventually she and her pilgrims finally find salvation in a parted sea. Or do they? Recollections of the event vary. And—to me, anyway—it's not an intriguing ambiguity, but more of a "this is poorly constructed and explained" situation.

I suppose, at the end of the day, if you like being strung along with no chance of things being explained to you at the end (because they never made sense in the first place), you might find this book "intriguing" or "mysterious." So, if you enjoyed watching "Lost," this book might be right up your alley. You can develop all sorts of interpretations for it, but nothing will ever really fit.

Bottom line: "The Satanic Verses" is tedious, and I don't think anyone much would read it or put it on "best of" lists if not for the controversy surrounding it. The fact that people died over its publication is made all the more tragic by the fact that it's just not a very good book.