The Satanic Verses + Glory: A Novel
The Satanic Verses + Glory: A Novel
Whatever you put next to this Rushdie novel is doomed to sound like a statement and/or social commentary.
A friend asked me recently, “Is The Satanic Verses a good book?” The question came the morning after Salman Rushdie was attacked at a literary event in America. I responded with not an answer, but a question: “Because if the novel is bad, it would be ok to stab him multiple times?”
“No, no, obviously not,” my friend replied hurriedly, looking embarrassed. “I was just wondering because the book seems to get everyone’s goat.”
Which is a funny thing to say about The Satanic Verses since one of the main characters in the novel is a gent who is half man and half goat.
My friend’s right about The Satanic Verses. It does have a track record of upsetting people. India was one of the first countries to effectively ban the book; thousands took to the streets in Pakistan to express their outrage after the novel came out; numerous bookstores in the UK and America were bombed or vandalised for selling it. And then, four months before he passed away, the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for the death of Rushdie and his publishers. It sounds like an absurd overreaction, but Rushdie had to go into hiding. Also, I recently found out — thank you Twitter and Wikipedia — that Rushdie’s Japanese translator was stabbed to death and there were attempts to kill two other translators. The Norwegian publisher of The Satanic Verses was shot at, and survived. The incident took place in 1993. It took the police till 2018 to identify and charge the alleged perpetrators — a Lebanese man named Khaled Moussawi and an Iranian diplomat who was serving at the Iranian embassy in Oslo at the time of the assassination attempt. (Both Moussawi and Iranian authorities have denied any involvement in the attack on William Nygaard, the Norwegian publisher.)
All of which makes it seem as though The Satanic Verses is as widely read as Harry Potter. It isn’t. People who want to censor authors or murder them are rarely big readers. I’m trying to think of another book that’s remained a topic of conversation for more than three decades not because of what’s in it, but because of the way the idea of the book makes people feel.
The first book I bought when I went abroad as a student was The Satanic Verses. I stayed up most of the night reading it, partly because the simple act of turning its pages felt like a tiny war cry against conservatism and also because the storytelling was unlike anything I’d read before. It was full of twists, tricks, fantasies, madness, irreverence, pain, rage and even joy. Rushdie had fun with English in a way that few South Asians writers did back then. I’d felt this in the past while reading his other books, but in The Satanic Verses, the literary mischief felt particularly irreverent and sharp.
If you think of the time when The Satanic Verses came out, maybe your imagination can stretch to understand someone feeling murderously angry at that novel. The late-Eighties and early Nineties were fury-fuelled years and the fact that the publicity from the fatwa helped The Satanic Verses become a bestseller could have made some people act irrationally. However, an attempt on Rushdie’s life 33 years after the fatwa was issued? By a 24-year-old American who was born nine years after Khomeini died? We tend to think of divisive politics as rooted in a particular time and context, but attacks like this one serve as a reminder that time may not be the great healer when it comes to societies. Hatred lingers and lurks in the shadows, waiting to tempt those who feel powerless. In a world that seems to ignore them, hateful politics offers a community and the illusion of having taken charge.
Was Hadi Matar, who has been charged with attempted murder for his attack on Rushdie, looking for fame and praise as Islam’s knight in shining armour? This young man seems to have found the monotonous toxicity of those who have bayed for Rushdie’s blood more persuasive than all that Rushdie has championed ever since he became notorious. This is something I can’t wrap my head around. Most authors are boring and frequently come off as arrogant. You’re better off reading their books than seeing them in person. You may even want to murder them if you’ve had to sit through a particularly dreary lecture/ Q&A. But not Rushdie. At events, he’s funny, insightful and makes you believe in the magic of storytelling. Yes, the man’s had a few uncleji moments, like when he got miffed at critic Parul Sehgal or when he chose to be a signatory on this letter that expressed concerns about ‘cancel culture’ (which is not a thing. If it was, then Louis CK would not have a career, but he does. He also has a Grammy.) At the end of the day, Rushdie is 75 years old and a man, but he is also undeniably charismatic. He’s a genuine wordsmith. You listen to him speak and it makes complete sense that he’s been married four times.
Evidently Hadi Matar does not agree with me. It’s profoundly depressing that hateful politics has proved to be more compelling than the ideas that Rushdie has stood for — freedom, charm, irreverence — over the decades. On the plus side, Rushdie’s son Zafar — who is familiar to many of us because of the dedication in Haroun and the Sea of Stories — told the press yesterday (or maybe the day before) that Rushdie was no longer on the ventilator and was able to speak to the family. Zafar also mentioned that his father’s “defiant sense of humour” remains intact. Reading that, my mind zipped to how The Satanic Verses begins, with Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha singing an English translation of “Mera Joota Hai Japani” and “Rule Britannia”. They’re hurtling through the skies after the plane they were in has blown up. Most of us wouldn’t think a mid-air disaster is necessarily the best backdrop for a comic scene, but that’s because most of us aren’t Rushdie. That opening is complete, delightful lunacy, and nestling in the hilarity are postcolonial insights.
Maybe I should go back and re-read The Satanic Verses… .
I suspect it would feel more satisfying than Glory: A Novel, by NoViolet Bulawayo. I’m sounding disgruntled because most of the reviews I read for Glory used words like “spellbinding” and this is one of the books longlisted for the Booker Prize. You can’t blame me for having high expectations.
Incidentally, NoViolet Bulawayo is a pen name that the author crafted out of the city she grew up in (Bulawayo), her mother’s name (Violet) and the word for ‘with’ (No) in Ndebele, a south African language. Bulawayo was 18 months old when her mother passed away and she’s said in an interview that her pen name is a way of honouring her mother. There are many mother figures in Glory and a mother-daughter relationship is the best part of the novel. At one point, a character named Destiny listens to her mother recount a story from the past that’s been buried in secrecy. After her mother has finished, Destiny shows her mother the scars that she’s been hiding. It’s a tender and painful moment that could have felt weird since the mother and the daughter are goats, but this is one of the few times when the emotional truth of the narrative makes more of an impact than the absurdity of characters who are non-human animals, but behave like people.
Early in Glory, one of the characters says, “This is not an animal farm”, which is obviously to be read with tongue firmly in cheek because Glory is very much Animal Farm. It’s a version of George Orwell’s iconic novel set in contemporary Africa. The fictional Jidada is a country with only animal residents and may remind a reader of Zimbabwe, especially since its dictator, Old Horse, has more than a passing resemblance to Robert Mugabe. After overthrowing its colonial overlords, Jidada was plunged into terrible violence as its new leaders got rid of “dissidents” in order to cement their own authority. The one who emerged out of this blood-spattered period was Father of the Nation, Old Horse, who went on to rule for “longer than the nine life spans of a hundred cats.” Old Horse’s dictatorship comes to an end when his second-in-command, Tuvy (another horse) dethrones Old Horse, with the help of the dogs who make up the military. The change in leadership is met with euphoria from the public and the common animals of Jidada start dreaming of real democracy. Running alongside Tuvy’s quest for power is the story of Destiny, a goat who returns after many years to find her mother is missing and the country is as violently chaotic as it was when Destiny left.
You don’t have to know the modern history of Zimbabwe to understand Glory is a political satire. Autocratic leaders, the stripping of civil liberties, abuse of power by the police and the military, and political apathy are far too common in our non-fiction world. This serves to make Glory easily relatable. For instance, when Old Horse’s speech is interrupted by a group of naked animals who call themselves Sisters of the Disappeared, I found myself thinking of the 2004 protest by the Mothers of Manipur, in which 12 naked women stood outside the headquarters of the Assam Rifles in Imphal, to protest the kidnap, murder and alleged rape of a 32-year-old woman. Jidada’s “#freefairncredible elections” also felt relatable, though those sections would probably feel like a documentary to a Filipino reader. A reader from Iran might see glimpses of the Green Movement in the way Jidada’s public takes to the streets at one point in the novel. The flip side of this relatability is that very little of what happens in Glory takes you by surprise.
Bulawayo’s decision to people her novel with animals seems to be guided by the idea that the animals will give the novel a cartoonish edge and make the harsh history contained in its plot easier to digest. However, for me, the first stumbling block was Bulawayo’s premise that animals behave like humans. After all the wildlife documentaries I’ve seen — David Attenborough’s voice overs! — this is a difficult sell. When Orwell was writing Animal Farm, not only was it more acceptable to imbue human traits into non-human animals, the relationship between humans and the wild was not as fraught. Today, we know that the predatory nature of humanity is unmatched in the animal kingdom. We’ve pushed numerous species to extinction, repeatedly culled vast numbers of our own species through pogroms, and endangered the planet as a whole — no other animal has done any of these things. Under the circumstances, in 2022, it’s difficult to suspend disbelief and imagine other animals behaving as people (particularly politicians) do.
It doesn’t help that Bulawayo doesn’t really explain how the animal society of Jidada is structured and occasionally imposes real-life human hierarchies on them. For instance, there are throwaway references to black animals being discriminated against and white animals enjoying privileges, but Bulawayo doesn’t explain how racism works in the animal world. For instance, where does a parrot falls in a colour-based hierarchy? There are other questions that pop up. Why are there no wild animals in Jidada? Are domesticated animals higher on the social pyramid than wild animals? Why are the horses the ones in power? Why is the military made up only of dogs? And why are all of these non-human animals wearing human clothes?
Bulawayo’s novel is about a relatively young nation trying to define itself and Glory makes pointed statements to establish its author is postcolonial and Black. Non-English words (without italics or translations) pepper the narrative, claiming literary equality with English. Within the frame of Animal Farm, some sub-plots use the tone of traditional folk tales, which have a long tradition of talking animals (though unlike Bulawayo’s characters, the animals in folk tales usually hold on to traits associated with their species). There’s an extended scene that references how George Floyd was killed in America. In short, Bulawayo never lets readers forget Glory is a novel with morals and messages for the real world. Unfortunately, she struggles to balance the storytelling with her political intentions. Even though the experiences she describes are grounded in contemporary events, not one of her characters feels like anything more than a literary device. Jidada is obviously an allegory, but it rarely feels like a real place with real people. Also, considering all the popular uprisings that have been dismantled by authoritarian governments in recent years, Bulawayo’s hopeful conclusion to Glory feels almost naive. Ironically, the descriptions of violence are more moving and memorable than the sections in which Bulawayo imagines Jidada’s divided society healing itself. It says a lot about the political scenarios that we see around us that hope, even in fiction, seems too simplistic to be credible. That too in a novel with talking animals.
Glory is one of two novels in the Booker longlist I’ve read. The other one is Shehan Karunatilaka’s Chats with the Dead, whose UK edition is titled The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. I wrote about it back when the novel’s Indian edition came out in 2020. It’s great fun.
And that’s more than enough yammering for one newsletter. Thank you for reading and Dear Reader will be back soon.