Going unsuccessfully west

Spectator, The, Apr 10, 1999 by Caute, David

THE GROUND BENEATH HER FEET

East-West is of course a central theme in Rushdie's work - alongside literary hit contracts for regicide and deicide - and this time his trajectory runs from uppercrust Bombay in the 1950s to rock'n'roll in the heyday of the Western counter-culture. At the centre of the epic narrative is a passionate love affair between two superstars of the rock music scene, Ormus Cama and Vina Aspara, characters whose virtually mythical status signals a reimagining of the Orpheus and Eurydice story, though I was left scratching my low brow over the parallel: Eurydice, it will be recalled, could be lost forever because Orpheus is unable to resist a single backward glance at her. Gluck's opera is introduced on an early page in Rushdie's much favoured tone of facetiousness: `Such a downer, I should send folks home with their faces long like a wurst? Hello? Happy it up, ja!, Sure, Herr Gluck, don't get so agitato.'

Ormus Cama falls in love with Vina Aspara when she is 12, and nobly refuses to lay a finger on her until she's 16. There is 'a single night of love, and then at once she vanished'. Ten years later they are briefly reunited in bed, but then she is off for another ten years; not offshore, merely off limits sexually -- their professional collaboration could continue. Of Ormus Cama we are told: `What a figure he cut in public! He glittered, he shone . . . His smile was a magnet, his frown a crushing defeat.'

Most of the action - there is little dialogue - is recounted by the book's nominal narrator, the born-in-Bombay photographer Umeed 'Rai' Merchant. `Many youngsters leave home to find themselves,' he explains. 'I had to cross oceans just to exit Wombay . . . I flew away to get myself born.' Late in Vina's short and hectic burn through world fame, dispensing dogmatic but contradictory opinions on how women should lead their lives, we are told by Rai: `For all her fooling with Buddhist wisemen (Rinpoche Hollywood and the Ginsberg Lama) and Krishna Consciousness cymbalists and Tantric gurus (those kundalini flashers) and . . . Zen and the Art of the Deal, the Tao of Promiscuous Sex . . .' and so it spins on, a narrative that constantly reduces the characters to playthings of their creator's incontinent genius while the Great Names of World Fiction, a Don deLillo, a Toni Morrison stuff extravagant quotes of praise into the great maw of Publicity.

Addicted to word-association, linkage and listing, Rushdie often seems to be solving competitions of his own devising. Say 'broken' and he will serve up `broken plates, broken dolls, broken English, broken promises, broken hearts'. These endless listings! The narrator's Indian mother, Ameer, described as `the family's great word-gamester', ruminates from Bombay on the names of American villages. `Who knows what-all kind of crazy names they have there? Not just Hiawatha-Minnehaha but also Susquehanna, Shenandoah, Sheboygan, Okefonkee, Onondaga, Oshkosh, Chittenango, Chikasha, Canandaigua, Chuinouga, Tomatosauga, Chickaboom.' Fans of magical realism will not feel let down. Not quite assassinated in 1963, JFK dies of the same bullet as his brother, 'President' Bobby, in 1968. As for rock music, born when Rushdie's main characters were still children,

This was the music that was allegedly first revealed to a Parsi Indian boy named Ormus Cama, who heard all the songs in advance two years, eight months and 28 days before anyone else . . . The music came to Ormus before it ever visited the Sun Records studio or the Brill Building or the Cavern Club. The narrative is discursive, often dandling itself on its own self-regarding knee. Why not? I have rarely found a page of Midnight's Children, Shame, or The Moor's Last Sigh, too slow - likewise the offending oriental passages in The Satanic Verses. Rushdie can go as slow as he likes in India or Pakistan and I'm still asking for more, spellbound. But when his fiction goes west, to England or America, a strained satirical stridency, a constant cartoon quality, induces periodic weariness and boredom.

By contrast, Rai Merchant's reflections on photography and the ethics of a professional news photographer are enthralling. `When my mother died, I photographed her, cold in bed . . . she resembled an Egyptian queen.' A further coup follows: `When my father died I took his picture before they cut him down.' Rai used a roll of film on his hanging dad: `Most of the shots avoided his face. I was more interested in the way the shadows fell across his dangling body. .' He concludes: 'I thought of these acts as respectful.'

Rai, also in love with Vina, returns from a photographic assignment in Vietnam sounding rather American. Rushdie is a professional foreigner in every corner and at every intersection of the planet, carrying with him a raft of websites, vocabularies and a fine inner ear for vulgarity. Locations resemble film studios dripping with arrowed signs. On pages 380-81, set in midSeventies Manhattan, we get `the fall of Saigon', `powdered happiness pashas clustered on the stoops of the brownstones of St Mark's', a `three-run homer', `Peace Ballads', `peace juice, bliss pills', `Happy Valley', and `First Amendment rights' - it often reads like early notes for a travel piece in Vanity Fair. Fairly regular 'fucks' and 'fuckings' remind one of those upset Muslims who plucked them out of The Satanic Verses like lice from infested hair. On page 468 there are 14 `fuck you's in nine lines. Ormus's music, meanwhile, conquers America: