Not for Fundamentalists 
 This is the book that resulted in Rushdie's having to flee a "fatwa" (death sentence) from the Ayatollah Khomeini. To a fundamentalist of any sort, the book is clearly anathema, for it is based on the understanding that most great religions start by reaching toward truth through myth; its subject is the intersection of myth and truth, and the different ways that good and evil can borrow one another's clothing. It is, in fact, a critique of religion--not ultimately a negative one, but certainly one that refuses to take anything as given. 
 Falling to earth after their hijacked airplane has exploded in midair, two Indian actors, the one a star in his own country, the other as Anglicized as they come, land miraculously on the English coast. One finds himself turning into the Archangel Gabriel, the other into the Devil himself. This is only the start of many miracles and transformations in a feat of linguistic legerdemain that leaps between modern London and the East in the time of the Prophet, teeming with brilliant characters, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, but all the while dealing with serious topics such as the nature of faith, national identity, and the redeeming power of love. 
 Reviewing The Moor's Last Sigh, I suggested that it might be modeled on Dante's Inferno; along the same lines, this is Rushdie's Paradise Lost. But Milton is far from the only author to whom Rushdie tips his hat in this heady book; an annotated edition might well take up a third of each page in footnotes! Some may find this infuriating; personally, I feel exhilarated--but I have to abandon any hope of getting more than half of Rushdie's multilingual, multicultural references, as much at home in Bollywood pop as classic Persian poetry. His gift for language is quite extraordinary, whether jamming words together, exploding them, or inventing new ones with Joycean abandon. 
 I must admit that the surface fascination of Rushdie's detail is such as to make it hard to read the book fast enough to get a clear sense of the direction of the whole; in both of his books that I have read, there was a difficult passage of 80 pages or so about two-thirds of the way through. But it is certainly worth perservering, for in this book especially Rushdie achieves a kind of transcendance by turning his back on his previous fireworks and ending in a style of disarming simplicity. The two final sections of the book are especially effective: a religious pilgrimage heading into a situation that can only be resolved by some kind of miracle, and an old man (not a major character, so no spoiler) dying of cancer. Simplicity as benediction; brilliance resolved as quiet beauty. 
 This is a world-class author writing about major themes of immediate relevance, and not afraid to do so in a style that is a combustible mixture of high erudition and popular entertainment. Forget the notoriety; read it!