April 13, 1999
BOOKS OF THE TIMES
'The Ground Beneath Her Feet': Turning Rock 'N' Roll Into Quakes
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
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THE GROUND BENEATH HER FEET
By Salman Rushdie.
575 pages. Henry Holt & Co. $27.50.
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he Ground Beneath Her Feet," Salman Rushdie's loose, baggy
monster of a new novel, is a retelling of the Orpheus myth that
recasts both the doomed musician and his lost lady love as rock
stars.
Picture Orpheus (one Ormus Cama, in Rushdie's telling) as a
brooding, kitschy combo of Elvis, Dylan and Lennon; and Eurydice
(that is, Vina Apsara) as a sort of fairy-tale composite of Madonna
and Diana, princess of Wales.
Picture Eurydice not only being condemned to Hades but also
being literally swallowed by the ground during an earthquake.
Picture Orpheus trying to recapture his beloved (or at least her
memory) by going on a worldwide stadium tour titled "Into the
Underworld."
Despite Rushdie's myriad talents as a writer, the resulting
novel is a decidedly disappointing performance: a handful of
dazzling set pieces, bundled together with long-winded digressions,
tiresome soliloquizing about love and death and art, and cliched
descriptions of the rock 'n' roll business worthy of Jackie
Collins.
Like so many of Rushdie's earlier novels "The Ground Beneath
Her Feet" addresses the themes of exile, metamorphosis and flux,
and like those earlier books it examines such issues through the
prism of multiple dichotomies: between home and rootlessness, love
and death, East and West, reason and the irrational.
We are once again treated to the story of several characters who
leave India to wander the world and invent new identities for
themselves abroad. And we are once again urged to read in their
story a lesson about our fragmented, chaotic world, a world that
this time is on the verge of cracking apart from tectonic cultural
shifts and political and social tremors.
The earthquake that takes Vina's life, along with Ormus' famous
cycle of "quake songs," becomes a presiding metaphor for
Rushdie's vision of our tumultuous age: a time in which both
nations and families are being flung apart by the centrifugal
forces of history, a time in which everything seems to be
"shifting, changing, getting partitioned, separated by frontiers,
splitting, re-splitting, coming apart."
Sadly for the reader, Rushdie seems to have misplaced his
magician's ability to fuse the mythic and the mundane, the surreal
and the authentic, into a seamless whole.
His earlier novels tended to be allegories about a particular
set of historical circumstances: "Midnight's Children" used the
story of its hero's spiritual decline as a parable of Indian
history since independence; "Shame" grounded its phantasmagorical
imaginings in the history of a country that was "not quite
Pakistan," and "The Moor's Last Sigh" effortlessly turned the
fate of its hero's family into a metaphor for India's recent ups
and downs.
"The Ground Beneath Her Feet," in contrast, exchanges concrete
context for a fuzzy internationalism, making a host of vague
allusions to events meant to evoke "the uncertainty of the
modern," from the Vietnam War to the Chinese crackdown at
Tiananmen Square to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
At the same time the marvelous Garcia Marquez-like flights of
fancy that enlivened Rushdie's earlier work are largely absent:
With the exception of the earthquake that devours Vina, there are
few miraculous events in this novel, no women metamorphosing into
panthers, no people falling out of airplanes, no children who can
travel through time.
The few touches of fantasy that do surface in the novel -- Ormus'
supposed ability to anticipate the very songs that Elvis, the
Beatles and Bob Dylan would make famous 1,001 days later -- feel
like gratuitous whimsies dutifully grafted onto generic
descriptions of rock concerts and music-business shenanigans.
Although the opening portions of the novel are animated by
scenes that conjure up the burbling, Dickensian life of Bombay with
Rushdie's patented elan, the novel rapidly winds down to become a
plodding chronicle of the intertwined lives of Ormus, Vina and
their friend and confidant, Rai, the narrator of this novel.
Ormus, we're told, is "the greatest popular singer of all,"
"a musical sorcerer whose melodies could make city streets begin
to dance and high buildings sway to their rhythm, a golden
troubadour the jouncy poetry of whose lyrics could unlock the very
gates of hell." Like Elvis, he is known for his pelvic gyrations
and curling lip; like Elvis, he is haunted by memories of a dead
twin brother, and like John Lennon, he is eventually gunned down by
a crazed fan.
Vina, on her part, is described as "a woman in extremis," an
outlaw singer who is continually reinventing herself, a troubled
woman who is mourned as a goddess by millions around the world
after her tragic death.
As for Rai, he's a familiar Rushdie figure, a spiritual relative
of Saladin, the displaced hero of "The Satanic Verses," and Moor,
the conflicted narrator of "The Moor's Last Sigh." A photographer
by vocation, Rai is a professional observer who finds his
skepticism sorely tested by his encounters with Ormus and who finds
his own detachment dissolving in his love for Vina.
At times Rai demonstrates Rushdie's magpie love of language (his
fondness for "whatever sounded bright and shiny"). But all too
often his meditations on the story of Ormus and Vina devolve into
ponderous pontifications, the babbling of someone in love with the
sound of his own voice.
He blathers on about Ormus having double vision, suggesting that
the world he and the other characters inhabit is a kind of mirror
world of our own. He wonders "if each of us has alternative
existences in the other continuum." And he speaks of "a
transitional phase" that "only the imperative force of the
Immense can force towards completion."
In the end this portentous mumbo jumbo sucks all the air out of
this novel and deprives Ormus and Vina of their vitality as
characters. By the end of the book they have become nothing but
brightly painted puppets, mechanically re-enacting the Orpheus and
Eurydice myth while laboring under the weight of their creator's
myriad philosophical theses.
As Rai himself suggests, they "had ceased to be real," they
had "become little more than signs of the times, lacking true
autonomy, to be decoded according to one's own inclination and
need."
Instead of turning the Orpheus legend into a compelling
postmodern myth, Rushdie has simply freighted an old story with his
favorite themes and the random detritus of our current celebrity
culture. In trying to write what he has called "an everything
novel," he has produced a strangely hollow book, a book that lacks
both the specificity and the magic that have enlivened his best
work in the past.
