I've just been looking for something light to watch while winding down (something has hit me hard in the last few days, I don't know what, and drained me of energy), and happened upon a show where the host finds out things that his guest has never experienced and makes sure they do - always something very popular or well-known that the person has avoided or missed out on. It's called "I've never seen Star Wars", which gives the flavour.
Anyway, the guest in the chair this time was very well read, and was familiar with most of the books on the show's list, and so they ended up discussing one of the two options she hadn't previously read, which happens to be one of my all-time favourites. And neither of them liked it at all, or understood it!
The book in question: The Satanic Verses.
Now, is it my background that makes me love this book so much? After all, I remember when I first read it, in the sixth-form library (probably mostly when I should have been at lessons), and the disappointment then when the teachers and the woman in charge of the library both dismissed it as nowhere near as good as Salman Rushdie's other books. They didn't seem to "get" it, either. I have wondered since whether you need to have experienced both an insistence on religion and an awakening of personal thoughts to appreciate it, and today's discussion kind of confirmed that. Obviously the religious people who read the book and hated it enough to wish the author dead realised what it was all about, yet these intelligent and educated people on the TV had so little clue that they were reduced to finding the book's synopsis on Wikipedia so as to be able to say anything about it. I could hardly believe it.
Very definitely The Satanic Verses is a heretic's book. The aim of it, it seems to me, is to explore the consequences of doubting dogma, how who we are is related to who we try to be, the shape of our souls in response to the mould of our circumstances, and the ridiculousness of the notion that there is any inherent meaning in the world or our lives. I can only conclude that for many people, none of that has much meaning. They have never experienced anything in their lives that lets them even see it within fiction. Certainly to skim through the book looking for some scandalous passage that caused the trouble is missing the point - both tonight's readers concluded that such a passage didn't exist.
And it doesn't. More, there is a steady drip-feeding of absurdity, and the unforgivable sin of treating a serious religion as slightly silly and mildly amusing BUT by someone who is clearly very familiar with its detail. That must have hurt, and clearly did. While modern agnostic Westerners have grown up thinking that religion is slightly silly and mildly amusing and that life is pretty pointless, and so, for them, a book that says so at great length is just deathly dull. Well, I think it's great.
But I am now feeling slightly vulnerable, having seen something I love belittled, and I am seriously wondering if I am in a one-man fan club here.
And, as an afterthought, I am also wondering what the result of a similar book that dealt with the brethren would be ...
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
I must have prophetic powers. I saw your last sentence coming.
Any chances that such a book might materialise?
This blog is thought provoking, I hope there will be a book!
I've had the outline for a novel taking up space in my head for some while, and I do think that the brethren are a really rich source of material as long as it isn't too literal. One of these days it'll probably get written, although I haven't scraped together the necessary time and commitment level yet.
But I do wonder, given that the brethren would almost certainly recognise themselves even if only the scenario was used and all details changed, whether the resulting trouble would be worth it. After all, only a tiny proportion of books do their authors any good, and a wave of resentment and litigation would rather swamp the satisfaction of getting the book out there.
Post a Comment