[BelleZora]

Originally Posted by Bookpossum

Saladin was certainly behaving in an evil fashion with his own "satanic verses" in the phone calls he made, and Gibreel was angelic in rescuing Saladin even though he had realised it was Saladin who had destroyed his relationship with Allie.

The evil Saladin was in need of rescue because, after he has destroyed Gibreel's fragile mind and relationship using an innocent woman to achieve his goal, he races into a burning building, despite the pain in his chest and left arm, to save the people inside.

Gibreel then rushes in and finds the fallen, traitorous Saladin, and this question is asked:

What happens when you win? When your enemies are at your mercy: how will you act then?

Gibreel asked Saladin: "Why'd you do it?, referring to the damage Saladin inflicted upon himself and Allie. And then Gibreel says:

‘Damnfool thing to be asking. Might as well inquire, what possessed you to rush in here? Damnfool thing to do. People, eh, Spoono? Crazy bastards, that’s all.’

Rushdie asks: "Is it possible that evil is never total, that its victory, no matter how overwhelming, is never absolute?"

This book asks so many questions that I can barely (or not even) comprehend them, much less the answers, although questions are obviously more important to Rushdie than answers. The questions that held my attention most concerned the presence of good and evil within the same person: how could this be? What does it mean?

Rushdie asks: "Are we coming closer to it? Should we even say that these are two fundamentally different types of self?"

...Gibreel, for all his stage-name and performances; and in spite of born-again slogans, new beginnings, metamorphoses; – has wished to remain, to a large degree, continuous – that is, joined to and arising from his past...making him that angelic Gibreel he has no desire to be; – so that his is still a self which, for our present purposes, we may describe as ‘true’ … whereas Saladin Chamcha is a creature of selected discontinuities, a willing re-invention; his preferred revolt against history being what makes him, in our chosen idiom, ‘false’?

I can't even begin to trace out the threads of all the other stories and how they make a whole. There is so much here. I actually began to keep a reading journal, the first time I've done so in decades. So I suppose that means the book is worth the effort to grapple with it, at least for me.