Status Updates From Szatańskie Wersety

Rushdie loves his cast. Secondary characters get in focus one at a time. Hind the scheming B&B host, Alleluia the ice queen. They serve more or less important causes in the advancement of the two main characters.
Sometimes really funny. After god appeared with storm clouds, Gibreel enjoys the subsequent good weather all the more. He fails his newly accepted role of god's sent missionary ludicrously.

Saladin grows more goat-like while hiding away in a B&B led by Bangladeshian emigrants. Like him, the other residents hide from attention. The daughters of the owner face the same challenge of not belonging as they want to. Lifes on the visible but unseen backside of London.
Just when the city is prepared for his arrival as devil, he transforms again in a massive outburst of anger.

Every second chapter is a dream sequence in which the Gibreel of "reality" becomes the archangel Gibreel. Reality Gibreel tries to avoid sleep due to these successive dreams haunting him.
In the second dream he first is called by an Imam in exile in London (probably Khomeini) to fight against Ayesha, an enemy of his. Then, he appears to Ayesha back when she was a poor orphan girl in muslim India/Pakistan.

After falling from the sky, Saladin physically turned into satan with sulfurous breath, horns and hoofs, got detained by immigration police, beaten up and ended in a ward with other mutants. Contrarily, Gibreel got a golden glow and charms everyone, lost his previously sulfurous breath and relives the 30s in Argentina with the widow who took him in. Not only in narration but in visions coming true through his navel.