The Ground Beneath Her Feet

The Ground Beneath Her Feet Review

The Ground Beneath Her Feet is Salman Rushdie’s most explicitly mythological novel — and also his most explicitly rock-and-roll one, which turn out, in his hands, to be the same thing. Published in 1999, it is a retelling of the Orpheus myth set across the second half of the twentieth century, following the Indian rock superstars Vina Apsara and Ormus Cama from their Bombay beginnings through London and New York to the heights of world fame. Rushdie’s thesis is that rock music is the Orphic tradition’s modern form: the art that descends to the underworld of the dead and attempts, always unsuccessfully, to bring back what it loves.

The novel’s narrator is Rai Merchant, a photographer and the third point of the novel’s central triangle: Vina and Ormus’s childhood friend, lifelong witness, and Vina’s sometime lover. Rai is a typically Rushdiean narrator — detached enough to observe, too close to be fully reliable — and his status as photographer is significant: he is the one who captures images of a world in motion, preserving moments that cannot be preserved in any other way. The novel is told backward from Vina’s death in an earthquake in Mexico in 1989, and then forward again through the decades of her life and career.

What Rushdie manages brilliantly is the integration of his alternate history — in this world, rock and roll’s history is slightly but significantly different, with Ormus and Vina as figures who parallel and diverge from our own rock mythology — with genuine engagement with what rock music actually does culturally. The music Rushdie invents for Ormus (who hears transmissions from a parallel world in his head, where the songs already exist before he writes them) is described with enough specificity to be credible, and his portrait of the rock world’s evolution from the early 1960s through the 1980s is vivid and often funny.

The novel’s weakness is its final section, in which Ormus’s ability to perceive the alternate world — a world where Vina is still alive and everything is slightly wrong — threatens to shift the novel from historical fiction into something closer to science fiction. The conceit is not fully controlled, and The Ground Beneath Her Feet ends somewhat less successfully than it begins. But at its best — in the Bombay sequences, in Vina’s transformation from Bombay girl to world superstar, in the sustained meditation on what it means to love someone who is always in the process of leaving — it is Rushdie at the full stretch of his ambition, which is to say one of the most ambitious novelists of his generation at his fullest extension.