The Satanic Verses

Is he to be the agent of God's wrath?

Or of his love?

Is he vengeance or forgiveness? Should the fatal trumpet remain in his pocket, or should he take it out and blow?

(I'm giving him no instructions. I, too, am interested in his choices – in the result of his wrestling match. Character vs. destiny: a free-style bout. Two falls, two submissions or a knockout will decide.)

Wrestling, through his many stories, he proceeds. There are times when he aches for her, Alleluia, her very name an exaltation; but then he remembers the diabolic verses, and turns his thoughts away. The horn in his pocket demands to be blown; but he restrains himself. Now is not the time. Searching for clues – what is to be done?– he stalks the city streets.

Somewhere he sees a television set through an evening window. There is a woman's head on the screen, a famous ‘presenter’, being interviewed by an equally famous, twinkling Irish ‘host’. – What would be the worst thing you could imagine? Oh, I think, I'm sure, it would be, oh, yes: to be alone on Christmas Eve. You'd really have to face yourself, wouldn't you, you'd look into a harsh mirror and ask yourself, is this all there is? – Gibreel, alone, not knowing the date, walks on. In the mirror, the adversary approaches at the same pace as his own, beckoning, stretching out his arms.

The city sends him messages. Here, it says, is where the Dutch king decided to live when he came over three centuries ago. In those days this was out of town, a village, set in green English fields. But when the King arrived to set up house, London squares sprang up amid the fields, red-brick buildings with Dutch crenellations rising against the sky, so that his courtiers might have places in which to reside. Not all migrants are powerless, the still-standing edifices whisper. They impose their needs on their new earth, bringing their own coherence to the new-found land, imagining it afresh. But look out, the city warns. Incoherence, too, must have its day. Riding in the parkland in which he'd chosen to live – which he'd civilized– William III was thrown by his horse, fell hard against the recalcitrant ground, and broke his royal neck.

Some days he finds himself among walking corpses, great crowds of the dead, all of them refusing to admit they're done for, corpses mutinously continuing to behave like living people, shopping, catching buses, flirting, going home to make love, smoking cigarettes. But you're dead, he shouts at them. Zombies, get into your graves. They ignore him, or laugh, or look embarrassed, or menace him with their fists. He falls silent, and hurries on.

The city becomes vague, amorphous. It is becoming impossible to describe the world. Pilgrimage, prophet, adversary merge, fade into mists, emerge. As does she: Allie, Al-Lat. She is the exalted bird. Greatly to be desired. He remembers now: she told him, long ago, about Jumpy's poetry. He's trying to make a collection. A book. The thumb-sucking artist with his infernal views. A book is a product of a pact with the Devil that inverts the Faustian contract, he'd told Allie. Dr Faustus sacrificed eternity in return for two dozen years of power; the writer agrees to the ruination of his life, and gains (but only if he's lucky) maybe not eternity, but posterity, at least. Either way (this was Jumpy's point) it's the Devil who wins.

What does a poet write? Verses. What jingle-jangles in Gibreel's brain? Verses. What broke his heart? Verses and again verses.

The trumpet, Azraeel, calls out from a greatcoat pocket: Pick me up! Yesyesyes: the Trump. To hell with it all, the whole sorry mess: just puff up your cheeks and rooty-toot-toot. Come on, it's party time.

How hot it is: steamy, close, intolerable. This is no Proper London: not this improper city. Airstrip One, Mahago

Where's this?

– Yes. – He meanders, one night, behind the cathedrals of the Industrial Revolution, the railway termini of north London. Anonymous King's Cross, the bat-like menace of the St Pancras tower, the red-and-black gas-holders inflating and deflating like giant iron lungs. Where once in battle Queen Boudicca fell, Gibreel Farishta wrestles with himself.

The Goodsway: – but O what succulent goods lounge in doorways and under tungsten lamps, what delicacies are on offer in that way! – Swinging handbags, calling out, silver-skirted, wearing fish-net tights: these are not only young goods (average age thirteen to fifteen) but also cheap. They have short, identical histories: all have babies stashed away somewhere, all have been thrown out of their homes by irate, puritanical parents, none of them are white. Pimps with knives take ninety per cent of their earnings. Goods are only goods, after all, especially when they're trash.

– Gibreel Farishta in the Goodsway is hailed from shadows and lamps; and quickens, at first, his pace. What's this to do with me? Bloody pussies-galore. But then he slows and stops, hearing something else calling to him from lamps and shadows, some need, some wordless plea, hidden just under the ti

He does not faint.

He stands among the kneeling children, waiting for the pimps.

And when they come, he at last takes out, and presses to his lips, his unquiet horn: the exterminator, Azraeel.

After the stream of fire has emerged from the mouth of his golden trumpet and consumed the approaching men, wrapping them in a cocoon of flame, unmaking them so completely that not even their shoes remain sizzling on the sidewalk, Gibreel understands.

He is walking again, leaving behind him the gratitude of the whores, heading in the direction of the borough of Brickhall, Azraeel once more in his capacious pocket. Things are becoming clear.

He is the Archangel Gibreel, the angel of the Recitation, with the power of revelation in his hands. He can reach into the breasts of men and women, pick out the desires of their inmost hearts, and make them real. He is the quencher of desires, the slaker of lusts, the fulfiller of dreams. He is the genie of the lamp, and his master is the Roc.

What desires, what imperatives are in the midnight air? He breathes them in. – And nods, so be it, yes. – Let it be fire. This is a city that has cleansed itself in flame, purged itself by burning down to the ground.

Fire, falling fire. This is the judgment of God in his wrath,’ Gibreel Farishta proclaims to the riotous night, ‘that men be granted their heart's desires, and that they be by them consumed.’

Low-cost high-rise housing enfolds him. Nigger eat white man's shit, suggest the unoriginal walls. The buildings have names: ‘Isandhlwana’, ‘Rorke's Drift’. But a revisionist enterprise is underway, for two of the four towers have been renamed, and bear, now, the names ‘Mandela’ and ‘Toussaint l'Ouverture’. – The towers stand up on stilts, and in the concrete formlessness beneath and between them there is the howling of a perpetual wind, and the eddying of debris: derelict kitchen units, deflated bicycle tyres, shards of broken doors, dolls’ legs, vegetable refuse extracted from plastic disposal bags by hungry cats and dogs, fast-food packets, rolling cans, shattered job prospects, abandoned hopes, lost illusions, expended angers, accumulated bitterness, vomited fear, and a rusting bath. He stands motionless while small groups of residents rush past in different directions. Some (not all) are carrying weapons. Clubs, bottles, knives. All of the groups contain white youngsters as well as black. He raises his trumpet to his lips and begins to play.