The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie

Published 1988 · 560 pages · 190,945 words · about 26 hours at an average pace · Coming-of-Age, Literary Fiction

How hard is The Satanic Verses to read?

The Satanic Verses scores 79 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it very challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 78 out of 100
Rushdie writes in exuberant, multilingual prose that incorporates Urdu, Hindi, and Arabic alongside English. The vocabulary is enormously demanding, with invented words, cultural references, and religious terminology layering through dense paragraphs.
Sentence structure: 80 out of 100
Sentences are often long, accumulative, and careening between registers. Rushdie's prose has the maximalist energy of someone trying to contain multiple worlds, histories, and voices in continuous invention.
Abstraction: 82 out of 100
The novel explores faith, doubt, migration, and transformation through two men who survive a plane explosion and find themselves changed. The Muhammad storyline questions the origins of religious revelation itself.
Information density: 80 out of 100
Islamic history, Bombay film culture, Thatcher's Britain, and the textures of diaspora layer through the massive narrative. Rushdie builds his worlds through encyclopedic attention to religion, politics, and the immigrant experience.
Narrative indirection: 82 out of 100
Multiple storylines across time and space require piecing together connections. The dream sequences raise questions about what's real, what's revelation, and what's hallucination—questions the novel refuses to resolve.
Symbolic density: 85 out of 100
The fall becomes symbolic of migration as transformation. Metamorphosis becomes symbolic of what immigration does to identity. The satanic verses themselves become symbolic of doubt within faith.
Ironic distance: 75 out of 100
Rushdie maintains substantial ironic distance from all forms of certainty—religious, political, cultural. The novel is playful about sacred narratives while seriously engaging with questions of faith and doubt.
Resolution withholding: 70 out of 100
The stories reach their conclusions but the questions persist. Rushdie offers endings without resolving what any of it means about God, faith, or the immigrant's divided self.
Structural complexity: 82 out of 100
Multiple storylines across different times and realities create a demanding structure. The novel requires readers to navigate between contemporary London, seventh-century Arabia, and dreamscapes with little guidance.

How The Satanic Verses is regarded

The Satanic Verses holds a literary regard score of 87 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Prizes

Where The Satanic Verses sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (390 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, The Satanic Verses scores 88 out of 100. A second mythos, tragedy, pulls at it with a weight of 0.25. About the map of stories.

Mode: Ironic
how banal, in comparison, was this modern spook, this degraded descendant of mighty ancestors, this feeble slave of a twentieth-century lamp.
Symbol: Anagogic
I am the dragging in the gut, I am the angel being extruded from the sleeper's navel, I emerge, Gibreel Farishta, while my other self, Mahound, lies listening, entranced
Mythos: Irony and Satire, phase 3 (satire of the high norm) (irony iii)
his metamorphosis into this supernatural imp – was being treated by the others as if it were the most banal and familiar matter they could imagine.
Genre: Anatomy + Romance + Novel
How does newness come into the world? How is it born?

Where the story of The Satanic Verses takes place

  • London and Bombay, late 1980s (Brickhall riot, Scandal Point) (1987 to 1989), the main setting
  • Jahilia and Yathrib, the Prophet Mahound's Arabia (Gibreel's dreams) (570 to 632)
  • Chamcha's Bombay and English boarding-school youth (1961 to 1966)
  • Titlipur to the Arabian Sea, the Ayesha Haj (Gibreel's dream) (1980 to 1989)
  • Imam's Kensington exile and Desh (dream-kingdom)

5 things that are true of The Satanic Verses, with the passage for each

  1. The novel opens with two men falling twenty-nine thousand and two feet towards the English Channel.

    two real, full-grown, living men fell from a great height, twenty-nine thousand and two feet, towards the English Channel

  2. The hijacked aircraft sits on the desert runway for one hundred and eleven days.

    The passengers were held on the hijacked aircraft for one hundred and eleven days

  3. The poet Baal marries all twelve whores of The Curtain, who are playing the twelve wives of the Prophet.

    Baal became the husband of the wives of the former businessman, Mahound.

  4. Ayesha, Mishal Akhtar and the villagers of Titlipur walk into the sea and are never seen again.

    Ayesha, Mishal Akhtar and the villagers of Titlipur subsided below sea-level; and were never seen again.

  5. Alleluia Cone dies by falling from the roof of the same skyscraper where Rekha Merchant died.

    Miss Alleluia Cone, in what was believed to be a ‘related incident’, had fallen to her death from the roof of the skyscraper

Scenes in The Satanic Verses that Frye would name

56 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Anagnorisis, untitled
Gibreel Farishta recognizes for the first time that the adversary has not simply adopted Chamcha's features as a disguise Gibreel's pivotal recognition that the enemy is Chamcha's own born evil, not a possession.
Pathos, untitled
put the barrel of the gun into his own mouth; and pulled the trigger; and was free. Gibreel's suicide is the book's closing death scene.
Pathos, untitled
Rekha and her children fell from Everest; no survivors. Sacrificial suicide-fall that haunts the whole book.
Agon, untitled
In a cave five hundred feet below the summit of Mount Cone, Mahound wrestles the archangel, hurling him from side to side A literal wrestling match between prophet and archangel.
Point of epiphany, untitled
I recall sort of floating over the last overhang and up to the top, and then we were there, with the ground falling away on every side. Allie's Everest summit vision where the two worlds touch.
Pharmakos, untitled
The crowd, needing no clearer invitation, stoned the baby to death. An illegitimate foundling is ritually killed as the Devil's child.

Books that share these scenes with The Satanic Verses

About the author

Salman Rushdie