"The cast-iron ‘plots’, the characters who don't come off, the longueurs, the paragraphs in blank verse..." These are the words Orwell used to describe everything "bad and silly" in the writing of Charles Dickens, and they're also a fair account of the faults in The Satanic Verses: characters' trajectories turn on a dime and bend torturously as the plot necessitates, interesting personalities share pages with ones that are more or less jokes with feet and arms, and there's a lot of poetic description that sometimes hits the mark, sometimes doesn't, but is relentless in any case.

The one fault you can't stick Dickens with is unclarity, either at the plot or moment-to-moment level: Bleak House's opening description of muddy winter London is, paradoxically, precise and pointillistic. Conversely, this book often felt to me muddy, muddled, mixed-up. It's there in the language, of course, like the opening scene, which often feels like an encrustration on the action rather than intrinsic to it. It's there in the wending turns of the plot, with characters jammed together densely. Muddy, muddy...