The Ground Beneath Her Feet By Salman Rushdie Jonathan Cape 575 pp, £18.00 in UK
A man writing under sentence of death might be expected to do so with some urgency, if not indeed economy. In this massive book, nearly 600 pages long, Salman Rushdie does neither, nor did he in The Moor's Last Sigh and the beautiful Haroun And The Sea Stories, two books that followed The Satanic Verses, the novel that provoked the Ayatollah's curse on Valentine's Day, 1989.
This is the date that begins The Ground Beneath Her Feet. Fear has not been Rushdie's response to the threat of violence his writing has brought him. Rather it is fury, a fierce indignation against a malign fate. Such indignation might seem like a marvellous fuel for the making of satire, and it is tempting to read The Ground Beneath Her Feet as a brilliantly cynical debunking of east/west cultural relations. Though, particularly in his dismembering of American music journalism, sections of the novel are wickedly, darkly funny, and Rushdie never loses his respect for subversion, The Ground Beneath Her Feet is too sorrowful, too strange to be limited to its comic character. To confine it thus is to miss the full picture, to distort its extraordinary architecture.
The first third of the book builds its foundations solidly. The city of Bombay stands at the very centre of the narrative. It is not by accident that its narrator, Rai, a photographer, is the son of an architect mother, obsessed with building skyscrapers, and a father equally obsessed with burrowing beneath the surface of the city itself, always revealing its secrets. Rushdie has always been a writer to admire for his lyrical prowess, and in The Ground Beneath Her Feet the most beautiful and moving fictions create the changing images of Bombay, its uniqueness, its diversity, its population of extraordinary eccentrics. This is not nostalgia. There is a rottenness at the heart of Bombay's political life, largely centred on the construction industry, that should speak volumes to an Irish audience. One of the most delicious ironies about the book is that The Ground Beneath Her Feet may well be the best yet written about the history of contemporary Dublin - a parallel not intended, surely, by Rushdie but one to be warmly welcomed.
This civic corruption touches everything. It tears apart the securities of the Cama and the Merchant families whose lives are the heart of the book's opening. Rushdie's mastery of craft is most potently felt as he delineates his personal map of Bombay, craftily pinpointing its fault lines of human failing, building up a dense network of social relations, then dynamiting apart the whole structure. There is no such thing as security in his world. Even in what appears to be the safest of refuges, the family home, the ground beneath your feet can open. If you do not wish to be devoured, then run like hell out of it. This is what Rai, and two great lights of the book, the musicians Ormus Cama and Vina Aspara do. They leave India.
I call Ormus and Vina the novel's lights - but in reality, as always, there is only one star, and Vina is unquestionably the star. Both Rai and Ormus are ultimately controlled by her. She is also, no doubt, the love of the novel's life and therein lies a problem that Rushdie does not solve.
Born in America of mixed white and Indian parents, as a child Vina has seen her father turn gay and her mother turned mass murderer. She has been uprooted from her small town and deposited with distant relatives in Bombay. A life crowded with incident, Wilde's Lady Bracknell would say, but it is only par for the course where Vina is concerned. There she meets Ormus - his name a basic compound of Orpheus and music. (Her name Vina, Rushdie tells us, is an Indian lyre.) She believes him when he tells her that he has been receiving messages from his twin brother who died at birth. These messages take the form of music.
And what music it is. Simultaneous to, perhaps even before the explosion of rock'n'roll in the West, in the depths of Bombay without television or a decent record store, Ormus Cana has been hearing in his head the same tunes, the same expulsions of sorrow that were to create a new generation. Rushdie cunningly rewrites rock history, so that its first genius is now called Jesse Garon Parker evilly managed and misled by Colonel Tom Presley. Other key figures are similarly rechristened. Van Morrison becomes Zoo Harrison and, my personal favourite, Carly Simon and Guinevere Garfunkel are heard singing their greatest hit, Bridge Over Troubled Water. This brilliant invention - Bombay was where the music began, man - is at the imaginative core of The Ground Beneath Her Feet.
If Rushdie reveals himself in any way in this book, then he certainly shows he is a fan, and a big one, of the music of his time. Patrick McCabe borrowed his title Breakfast on Pluto from the busker Don Partridge's hit: Salman Rushdie steeps The Ground Beneath Her Feet with his passion for, and enormous knowledge of, the whole sweeping history of rock. They give an authenticity to his descriptions of the music of VTO, the band formed after their exile in England and America by Ormus and Vina. It storms the world. Keats's "unheard" melodies provide, then, more than the soundtrack to the novel. They are its reason to believe in the universe it makes and unmakes, and its soul is centred on the voice of Vina Aspara. It is pointless to look for her correspondences in our world. They are so many, from Sinead O'Connor to Princess Diana, Madonna to Marianne Faithfull, that what is remarkable is how strongly she emerges as her own woman. Outspoken, witty, vindictive, savage, intelligent, stupid, brutal, sensual, she is as I've said, the novel's star - and when she burns, all others are cast into relative darkness. Ormus cannot hold a candle to her. Whatever about their appearances on stage, in the novel she blasts him off the page. Rushdie writes about the composer's greatness, his originality, but he convinces you about Vina's. The most telling aspect of this is that Ormus only finds his powerful voice in the book when he writes his erotic lyrics about her.
When she dies in an earthquake, with 10 pages to go, the fire goes out and the novel flickers to its end, for the tale has been told and should be stopped. It doesn't, and that is the flaw of The Ground Beneath Her Feet. Vina's apparent reincarnation as the feisty Mira Celano, with whom the narrator finds domestic bliss, is a bad mistake, a sentimental conclusion to a story that up to this has thrived on chaos and contradiction, aggressively rejecting such neat solutions.
Or perhaps it is Rushdie's last joke. Having stressed from the start that family stability is the most unstable ground of all, he leaves his narrator comforted by its illusions. But the way this world operates is through upheaval. Earthquakes occur everywhere - Vina dies in one. And the book's refusal to mourn her, in the face of universal mourning of her death - it out-Dianas Diana - preferring instead to reincarnate her, then reject that too, this is typical of Rushdie's aversion to elegy. In his fiction he has never resorted to self-pity at the appalling crisis he has endured for the past 10 years. As I've said, fury has been his response; that, and a ferocious determination to confront his eastern and western inheritances, be they myths, philosophies or musics. His learning is great, and to display it he reports too often to lists of information, a seriously irritating habit. But nobody's perfect. The Ground Beneath Her Feet is a deeply unstable book from a deeply sane imagination.
Frank McGuinness's new play Dolly West's Kitchen will be per- formed in the Abbey in the autumn.
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