Going Global. - Review - book reviews

Reason, Nov, 1999 by Kanchan Limaye

The Ground Beneath Her Feet, by Salman Rushdie, New York: Henry Holt and Co., 575 pages, $27.50

The Ground Beneath Her Feet is, for all its flaws, one of the hippest novels of our time. Salman Rushdie has written - or has he composed? - a pun-filled MTV rockumentary. An inventive, gargantuan love story whose prose pulsates with enough rhythm to make your foot tap, the novel chronicles the rocky love affair between partial divinity Vina Apsara, a legendary half-Indian, half-Greek pop singer, and Ormus Cama, her part-divine musician soul-mate. Together, they form a band called VTO that becomes the most famous rock act in the world.

The novel retells the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice in pop-cultural terms that sometimes border on the ludicrous: Ormus actually takes an "Into the Underworld" tour to find Vina, who has been swallowed by an earthquake. Narrated by the photographer Rai, a mortal wistfully obsessed with Vina, the epic romance of Ormus and Vina thunders its way through the cosmopolitan Bombay of the 1950s and the vivid London of the 1960s, only to fester capriciously in frenzied contemporary Manhattan and then plummet into oblivion and eternal grief. (Rushdie was never one to lack drama.) The plot hurtles unstoppably forward, save for a few wearying riffs on the history of rock 'n' roll and the music business, and several blathering passages on love, art, and death. Ultimately, the plot overruns a deeper, subtler examination of the characters' inner lives.

Vina is a formidable hybrid of bombshell rock star - a la Madonna/Whitney Houston/Courtney Love - and goddess - a la (according to Rushdie) Helen/Eurydice/Sita/Rati/Persephone. Her young lover Ormus, a visionary blessed and cursed with the capacity to see into worlds parallel to our own - a gift that drives him mad - is a sexy, hip-gyrating, Indian combination of Elvis, John Lennon, and Dylan, with an Orphic fate thrown in to sweeten the pot. (Fashion designer Sandy Dalal comes to mind for the movie role.)

Inventive, ambitious, and complex, Rushdie's novel speaks to the cosmopolitan experience of his audience. Cultures begin fusing from page one and continue mutating until the end. The novel depicts a world in which Mullens Standish, a once-married homosexual radio pirate with two children, can be found in the same scene as a bullock-driving, lunghi-wearing Indian country farmer. It is a world in which Ormus' father, Sir Darius Cama, an end-of-the-empire Anglophile barrister, devotes his later life to unearthing the similarities between Homeric and Indian myth. It is a world where Sam's Pleasure Island, a popular unwinding joint for music business honchos that doubles as a sci-fi dystopia, resembles the intergalactic bar in the original Star Wars - complete with space gods born on Martian asteroids. It is a place where Ormus, a Bombay-born-and-bred musician, flies to London wearing black European hipster jeans, but also a Yankees baseball cap and a cutaway Beat-generation T-shirt, as if to announce, "old England cannot hold me, it may pretend to be swinging but I know it's just plain hanged. Not funky but defunct. History moves on."

Rushdie follows up on that thought with a brilliant passage that reads - or rather sings - like a rock 'n' roll love paean to America's self-inventing chaos, complete with the yikitaka-yikitaka and boom-chicka-booms of Ormus' drumbeat-laden inner voice: "The Polish dances, the Italian weddings, the Zorba-slithering Greeks. The drunken rhythm of the salsa saints. The cool music that heals our aching souls, and the hot democratic music that leaves a hole in the beat and makes our pants want to get up and dance.... Yay, America. Play it as it lays."

Ormus passes for Jewish, Italian, Spanish, Roman, French, Latin American, "Red" Indian, and Greek. "Race itself seems less of a Fixed point than before," he notes upon arriving in Manhattan. And Rai observes, "Here he is at the frontier of the skin." Ormus and Vina's music crosses all frontiers, rising above the limits of family, clan, nation, and race and flying over the minefields of turf and taboo. Though Ormus has always hoped that humans would rub out the color line - not just cross it - it is Vina who ultimately brings about this larger sense of global kinship. Upon her death, mourners on the front lines of the world's armed conflicts lay down their weapons to embrace.

Throughout the novel, Rushdie satirizes and celebrates American consumerism, showing us the wonder and absurdity of the "late capitalism" we take for granted as Americans. We eventually see Vina-Divina cheapened (and made wealthy) as Vina-Martha Stewart, complete with a best-selling diet book, celebrity exercise videos, and "Vina's Vege Table" organic meal series. When Vina dies, the American consumer machine cashes in. Scandals come to light under frenzied radio, TV, and press coverage. Drama and music critics immediately hold public panels. Then come the retrospectives, tribute albums, charitable donations, and memorial concerts. Gary Larson draws Vina's cartoon. Feminists, intellectuals, priests, cultural studies gurus, and psychoanalysts all weigh in on the Vina phenomenon. TV producers look for Vina look-alikes. Ironically, Rushdie himself has written a story worthy of a blockbuster marketing push: Bono has already set a movie soundtrack title song, "The Ground Beneath Her Feet," to music for U2's next album.