→ June 27, 2019
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The Satanic Verses.

If you knew one thing about Salman Rushdie, it’s probably that he spent much of his life under an Islamist death sentence known as a fatwa, issued by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989 in response to Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses. The Ayatollah claimed that the book was blasphemous, and he refused to retract the order – which said that any Muslim would be a martyr for killing Rushdie and also issued the threat of death against his editors and publishers – even after Rushdie issued a half-hearted apology. The Iranian government has only backed away from the fatwa in the intervening three decades, never lifting it, and the massive bounty on Rushdie’s head is still in place.

The Ayatollahs would have done far more for their own cause by ignoring the book, because I find it hard to believe enough people would read this dense, highly metaphorical, bloated novel, and understand its implications for devout Muslims, to make one iota of difference in the Islamic world. They Streisanded the whole thing by drawing attention to it, and made the book a global best-seller when it would probably have faded into oblivion had they done nothing. I’m not even sure the book is that good, but I feel confident few readers would have waded far enough into it to care about the parts that so offended the Ayatollah.

The Satanic Verses starts with two men who fall from an airplane that has been blown up over the English channel by a suicide bomber but are saved by an unknown miracle, after which they are transformed into the archangel Gibreel (Gabriel) and into a devil, or perhaps the devil. (The book was published less than three months before Libyan terrorists bombed Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.) The two narratives split and then twist around each other, with Gibreel’s story drifting into dream sequences of magical realism or simply the delusions of a man with schizophrenia, while Chamcha, the man who sprouts horns and a tail like a devil, encounters a more mundane series of nightmares that begin with abuse by immigration authorities.

Gibreel’s dreams include visions of a businessman named Mahound – itself a derogatory name for Mohammed – who becomes a prophet, is fooled by a scribe who deliberately errs in writing down Mahound’s words, and whose wives are mocked by the twelve prostitutes at a brothel in Jahilia, which is a pre-Islamic name for Mecca. They also include the incident to which the book’s title refers, in which Mohammed exhorted Arab followers to keep three of their pagan goddesses, only to later recant the statement and claim he was fooled by Satan into making it. The depiction of the prophet Mohammed as a rube, a con man, or a sexual libertine was sure to anger devout Muslims, although some of this is buried beneath Rushdie’s dense, florid prose, and nearly all of it is written in the unreality of Gibreel’s visions.

Chamcha’s journey is much easier to follow, even with his on-and-off transformation into a hirsute demon, and explores more humanist themes of alienation from country and family. His domineering father tried to control Chamcha through money and familial obligations, an oppressive maneuver that helped encourage the son to flee India for England, where he encountered a new type of social and cultural isolation. The metaphor involved, of the father standing in for one’s country of birth, and the natural desire to reconnect before it’s too late to matter, is easier to grasp, and the narrative of Chamcha’s life is mostly linear and grounded in reality. Except for the horns.

Parsing what’s real in Gibreel’s narrative and what’s imagined or hallucinated is difficult enough, but it’s exacerbated by Rushdie’s prose style, between his prodigious vocabulary and often poetic musings, and his lax attitude towards time. The novel’s great climactic scene includes a march of penitents to Mecca and to the sea, led by a young girl Ayesha who claims she’s communicating with the Archangel, where the faithful follow her into the Red Sea. Whether they survived and transcended or merely drowned is left to the reader – and to the surviving, less faithful neighbors and family members who watched them disappear.

Rushdie also engages in substantial wordplay and masked allusion that went well over my head because I have no background in Islamic history or writings and minimal knowledge of even geography in that part of the world. I didn’t realize until after I’d finished that the Mount Cone of the novel is Jabal an-Nour, which houses the Cave of Hira where Mohammed meditated and, according to Islamic history, received his first revelation. Rushdie renames the mountain and then delivers puns on the name, including Gibreel’s very human objet d’amour, Alleluia (Allie) Cone, who has no interest in the spiritual mountain and instead spends her life trying to climb the most materialistic of peaks, Mount Everest.

One recurring motif I did catch in The Satanic Verses is that of characters falling; in Rushdie’s world, a whole hell of a lot of people either jump or fall, mostly to their deaths, except for the two main characters who inexplicably survive. Gibreel, in fits of either madness or jealousy, kills several people by throwing them from buildings. At least two minor characters die by jumping from heights. Allie’s treks on Everest are marked by reminders of the possibility of falling, and eventually hypoxia causes her to hallucinate as well, although her eventual death comes off the mountain. The falls are always in the physical world, but given the context of the novel and Rushdie’s staunch atheism, it seems likely the falls represent man’s ‘descent’ from naïve superstition into the harsher world of a materialist, unthinking cosmos.

I had mixed feelings on Rushdie’s Booker Prize-winning novel Midnight’s Children, but it was a far more successful and accessible novel than The Satanic Verses. This latter book felt a bit like Joyce’s Ulysses, which Joyce made clear was a book to be dissected and analyzed, not to be read. You could write papers just on side characters or word choices or recurring images across the book, to say nothing of the overarching themes of identity, alienation, or religion. But as a straight read, The Satanic Verses is maddening, and not in the way the Ayatollah meant.

Next up: I finished Kobo Abe’s The Woman in the Dunes this morning.

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→ July 6, 2018
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Wise Blood.

Flannery O’Connor is a fascinating figure in American literature – a staunch Catholic who wrote macabre, misanthropic, even violent stories seem to stem from a mind like Cormac McCarthy’s, becoming a leader of the new Southern Gothic style before her death at 39 of complications from lupus. Her short story collection A Good Man is Hard to Find includes the title story, one of the creepiest I’ve ever read, a story that seems completely without hope and presents as dark a view as possible of humanity.

O’Connor wrote two novels, including Wise Blood, about a young man named Hazel Motes who decides he’s going to start a Church Without Christ, a sort of anti-church, not a church of atheism specifically but a church opposed to churches. If it sounds like a less than coherent philosophy, then you’ve got the idea, as Hazel is very mad and not very smart. He’s befriended by the teenaged zoo employee Enoch, an eager and socially inept youth who is looking for anyone to whom he can attach himself. Hazel’s half-hearted attempts to preach his anti-gospel are quickly subsumed by a local con man, who names his church the Holy Church of Christ Without Christ and starts collecting donations while steering attention away from Hazel. Hazel’s rage gets the best of him as he sees someone else profiting from his ideas, leading to violence and then a period of remorse marked by self-mutilation and asceticism.

Wise Blood is disjointed, and side characters and themes come and go without much bother, so it wasn’t surprising to see (after I read it) that O’Connor cobbled it together from previously written short stories and her master’s thesis (the first chapter). The one unifying element is Hazel himself, a damaged World War II veteran whose family has disappeared while he was away, and who returns believing in nothing at all – a pure nihilist, angry at the world and at the God in which he claims to disbelieve. He’s a comic antihero, in part because he’s a bit of a moron, and in part because so much of what he does goes awry. So while the novel does have a climax and long resolution, it’s more a connected set of stories around Hazel’s return from war and anti-religious fervor, culminating in his attempt to find redemption via masochistic means after committing a horrible crime.

O’Connor makes heavy use of symbolism in her works, none more here than the repeated references to characters’ eyes. We get the crooked preacher who pretended to blind himself with quicklime but is the first one to see through Hazel for what he is. Hazel is stopped by a police officer at one point whose eyes are ‘diamond blue.’ The crooked preacher’s daughter, named Sabbath Lily, decides she loves (or just wants) Hazel because of what she sees in his eyes – that he’s not just looking at you, but through you into the future. And the name Hazel Motes includes two allusions to eyes or sight, hazel as a distinctive eye color, and mote as a reference to Matthew 7:3-5 (“And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?”), which decries those who see flaws in others but are blind to faults in themselves.

But despite comic elements and text rich with metaphor and allusion, Wise Blood feels inconsequential; I read it, but never felt absorbed at all in the story, and found the redemption arc too inverted to connect with it. The side characters are all too one-dimensional and serve as props for Hazel’s actions, not as fully-realized individuals themselves. And the ending moves more into speculative fiction territory, losing any threads of realism we’d had earlier in the book. The Guardian named this one of the 100 best novels ever back in 2003, but I’ve read a few hundred novels better on both a literal and a symbolic level.

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→ October 12, 2017
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A Case of Conscience.

James Blish’s novel A Case of Conscience won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1959, the fifth time the award had been given out, kicking off a run of books that are still considered classics today: Starship Troopers, A Canticle for Leibowitz, Stranger in a Strange Land, The Man in the High Castle, and Way Station won the next five Hugos, and Dune won two years after that streak. It was a golden age of science fiction, particularly of sci-fi novels that tackled major philosophical themes; Blish’s novel, his only winner, remains one of the few novels to win the award that uses a science fiction plot to examine questions of religion and morality. It’s a curious work, a novella that was then doubled in length to turn it into a novel, and has some of the stitched-together quality you’d expect, but also gives the reader a fairly compelling central story that centers on a Jesuit priest’s crisis of conscience while also working in issues around colonialism, exploitation, and violent political movements.

Father Ramon Ruiz-Sanchez is the story’s protagonist and moral center, one of a group of four humans on the planet Lithia, assigned the task of determining whether it is safe to open the planet for human contact. The rest of the crew comprises three scientists of varying views on religion and morality, including the rationalist/atheist Cleaver, a physicist who discovers that the planet is a potential source of raw material for the production of nuclear weapons. The Lithians, reptilian creatures who walk on two legs, live in a utopian society where their culture and language lack words for conflict, dissent, or crime … but they are also a completely secular society, without any concept of religion or God. Father Ruiz-Sanchez begins to suspect that the planet itself was created by Satan, as it is a near-perfect attack on core principles of Catholic theology, and argues that the planet should be “quarantined” from all contact with earth. The team is unable to agree on a recommendation, and Ruiz-Sanchez acknowledges that Cleaver is likely to get his wish in the end. The Lithians, unaware of any of this conversation, give Ruiz-Sanchez a parting gift as they leave: an embryo (in an egg) of a Lithian, in a special container designed to allow the fetus to survive the journey back to Earth. (Lithians do not raise their young as humans do, which is explained at length in the text.)

In part two, the Lithian embryo becomes the grown Egtverchi, a ten-foot tall saurian biped who experiences a whole new level of culture shock as he’s exposed to human civilization. Possessed of a tremendous capacity to learn, he quickly absorbs most human knowledge, and I think it’s fair to say he’s not terribly impressed by it. He becomes a pop phenomenon, getting his own reality TV show, and encouraging his viewers to act on their discontent with their jobs, their government, and so on. His following is large enough to lead to mayhem in the streets, all while work to convert Lithia into a giant lithium deuteride factory continues fifty light-years away. Father Ruiz-Sanchez, meanwhile, is charged with heresy, faces an audience with the Pope, and comes back at the UN’s request to deal with the situation Egtverchi has created.

The novel is brief, just over 200 pages, but packs a lot of ideas into its two sections. The first part, originally published on its own, is a sort of thought experiment: Blish appears to have been very familiar with Catholic teachings and created a civilization in the Lithians that would refute that doctrine, such as that a peaceful world would not be possible without God. Blish gives Ruiz-Sanchez this challenge, and forces him to confront it and try to convince at least one of his skeptical colleagues to agree to his plan to close off the planet from human contact. Without the second half, however, it’s fairly flat, devoid of any tension, and the potential risks from Ruiz-Sanchez’s scenario are far from evident. A Case of Conscience needs Egtverchi to bring the priest’s concerns to life, and he does so in stark, shocking ways, stirring up an angry populist mob in a storyline that seems to presage everything from Fight Club to the 2016 U.S. election.

Blish also opens the door to discussions about imperialism and exploitation of colonies with the setup of his novel, as humans have developed the technology to get to Lithia and have made numerous scientific discoveries that the Lithians, while an advanced society, have not. Lithia itself has very little iron, limiting their progress in some key aspects of physics or chemistry, adding to the sense that humans are the ‘superior’ race, which, in Cleaver’s mind, means there’s no problem with showing up on someone else’s planet and plundering it of resources, even if the cost is environmental destruction or other massive disruptions of the native species. The theme isn’t entirely fleshed out here because the second half of the novel takes place almost entirely on Earth, but the questions lay open in the text, and given that Blish wrote it in the 1950s while western countries still held nearly all of Africa and swaths of southern Asia as colonies, I imagine that was at least a model for him in devising the structure of his universe.

I won’t spoil the resolution of A Case for Conscience other than to say that I enjoyed its ambiguity; I think it’s a perfect way to get around the religious question involved in the conclusion without dismissing it entirely. Blish’s portrayal of Ruiz-Sanchez is thoughtful and respectful in a way that most science fiction authors’ words aren’t; many sci-fi novels ignore religion entirely or portray it as an artifact of the past, something sloughed off over time or destroyed by the progress of science. Such twists tend to miss the importance of religion to human culture (for better and worse) and how religion gives many people an answer to the meaning of life. Blish, whom the introduction to the version I read labels as an agnostic, deserves credit for creating a man of the cloth who is credible, well-drawn, and appropriately flawed.

Next up: David Brin’s The Uplift War, another Hugo winner.

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→ June 13, 2011
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A Canticle for Leibowitz.

I’m not sure how I stumbled on Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, a Hugo Award-winning novel from 1961 that depicts a post-apocalyptic earth going through inevitable cycles of progress and regression. As far as I can tell, it wasn’t a reader suggestion, and I very rarely read science fiction, but somehow I added this to my queue about six months ago. I’d say it was worth reading for the obvious influence it had on later works, but found it an arduous read and a damn depressing one at that.

In Canticle, humanity has nearly wiped itself out through nuclear war, but survivors are rebuilding civilization or simply banding together in tribes habitable areas. The Catholic Church figures heavily in Miller’s book (he was Roman Catholic as well), and serves as a preserver not just of morality and faith but of knowledge after the remaining masses rise up against the intelligentsia, especially scientists, in retaliation for the unleashing of the destructive power of the atom, a passage that unfortunately presaged the real-life genocide of intellectuals in Cambodia under Pol Pot. As humanity moves forward again in fits and starts, the role of the Church changes in society in an exploration of the relationship between small-c church and institutions such as state and science.

The novel is actually a collation of three novellas, each depicting a different time period beginning about six hundred years after the nuclear holocaust, but all centered on a Catholic abbey in the Rocky Mountains dedicated to Saint Leibowitz, a former electric engineer who joined the clergy after the war and gave his life to preserve pre-war scientific knowledge. In the first section, a meek monk-in-training accidentally discovers a fallout shelter that may hold the remains of Saint Leibowitz’ wife, as well as other artifacts from his time deemed by the Church to hold great historical importance. In the second section, an agnostic scholar and researcher visits the abbey as one of the monks is preparing to demonstrate the first (post-war) electric lamp. In the third part, the abbey prepares to send several of its monks to a human colony on Alpha Centauri bearing both ecclesiastical “Memorabilia” and secular knowledge to escape an impending second nuclear war, bringing about a debate between the abbot and a nonreligious doctor over euthanasia for victims of the first attack. Through all three books a Jewish wanderer appears, perhaps the same person despite the span of centuries, waiting for the Messiah while assisting (sometimes in peculiar ways) one or more of the monks.

The three epochs demonstrated in the book mirror three major periods in modern human history – the pre-Enlightenment period where the church’s primacy in civilization and in the advancement of knowledge was largely unchallenged; the Enlightenment itself, where science took away domains of learning previously belonging to the church; and the twentieth century, with nuclear weapons, the repetition of past calamities, and, in what I presume was Miller’s view, a loss of morality tied to the gradual withdrawal of religion from the center of everyday life.

As a social document or a theological one, I imagine the book holds great value; Wikipedia – which we know is never wrong – mentions “a significant body of literary criticism, including numerous literature journal articles, books and college courses” around Canticle. That doesn’t make it a compelling read even if it might be an important one, and the lack of compelling or sympathetic characters left the text feeling more like a history than a great novel. I would imagine from the descriptions of both the local setting of the abbey and the state of humanity and its governance that the book had a heavy influence in literature and literary offshoots after its publication; On the Beach followed two years later, and the world described in part one of Canticle reminded me more than once of the post-apocalyptic setting of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Although I never got into role-playing games, I remember trying one from the 1980s called Gamma World that had to be drawn in part from Miller’s work or its literary progeny, and I’d imagine Wasteland and Fallout (which I’ve never played) drew either straight from Canticle or from it by way of Gamma World.

Influence or importance might get me to read a book, and Miller’s formal prose wasn’t as unbearable as that of Henry James or Theodore Dreiser. But I couldn’t give this much of a recommendation to anyone who reads strictly for pleasure.

Next up: J.P. Donleavy’s comic novel The Ginger Man.

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