Salman Rushdie, author most famously of ''Midnight's Children,'' opens his fourth and latest novel, ''Satanic Verses,'' with a scene of human figures tumbling from the debris of a hijacked jumbo jetliner. The plane is named Bostan, which is both a Farsi word for garden and the title of the great didactic poem by the 13th-century Persian poet Sadi, proclaiming the virtues of justice, benevolence, self-restraint, gratitude, penitence and so on. This detail is not insignificant in Mr. Rushdie's work, where each act of naming is dense with implication. And the name ''Bostan'' might prompt us to ask, isn't this precisely what the fabled Oriental garden has become in our day - a terrorized, disintegrating jumbo jet?
Falling slowly over the English Channel, the sole survivors are a strange twosome: Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha. Gibreel is a celebrated face and figure of the Indian cinema, star of the genre films known as ''theologicals.'' Chamcha is a star of the dubbing trade on British radio and television, a man of a thousand and one voices, none of them his own. His face is unknown to his audiences. He is an ardent Anglophile, a self-created man, who, with poetic license (and poetic justice) is about to be transformed by forces beyond his control.
