The Satanic Verses

"I’m interested in the trials, of course – particularly the trial here, but also the trial in the States – because of what they meant in the context of the 1960s. Just as I’m interested in what The Satanic Verses meant at the moment of its publication in 1989/90: with the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War , the extinction of socialism as a project of human liberation, and, coincident with that, the emergence of Islam or Islamism as both a threat and a promise – and how a novel manages to be the axis on which these huge global events turn. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Lady Chatterley represents a moment of liberation, just as The Satanic Verses also represents a moment of liberation – the end of the Cold War – but also the inauguration of a different kind of struggle. Is it correctly conceived as a war of civilisations? Probably not. Is it correctly conceived as a war on terror? Definitely not. But there is no doubt that there is a new agon, a new principle of division and conflict in all its complexity, and The Satanic Verses prefigures it as well as contributing to it. So, those three books, not just as objects of censoring attention, but also as instruments through which one can think about censorship, seem to me to be probably the three most important books in the 20th century, from that point of view. I hope not! It feels to me that they all insist on themselves as literary works. I mean, Hardy, in this very complicated way in which he both elevates literature and ‘the letter’ on the one hand, and on the other hand casts it down as ‘the letter killeth’ (the novel’s epigraph), articulates a very divided sense of what literature is and what a commitment to the literary life can entail – but he puts literature at the centre of his concerns. Lawrence described the novel as ‘the bright book of life’, and for him there was a redemptive quality to literature. Rushdie articulates one of the central conflicts in The Satanic Verses through the collision of the Poet with the Prophet in those passages of the novel that concern visions and dreams about the early life of Muhammad. All these novels are literary works through which literature itself is analysed and pondered, and subjected to an elevated and elevating scrutiny. I hope what I’ve said doesn’t suggest one should neglect their literary properties."