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Starting with the now classic Midnight's Children, voted the
Booker of Bookers, followed by Shame, The Satanic Verses and the
triumphant The Moor's Last Sigh, Salman Rushdie has established
himself as one of the most compelling storytellers in
contemporary fiction. Throughout Rushdie's writing runs the
belief that without the democratic, irreverent, subversive
playfulness of stories, we lose our sense of humanity and
identity and sink into the nightmare of history which his novels
so powerfully indict. The pursuit of such beliefs has of course
left a lasting impact on Rushdie himself, from the violent
response to his indictment of Pakistani politics in Shame to the
response of Islamic fundamentalism to The Satanic Verses, to
which Rushdie's ultimate response was the deeply moving study of
religious and cultural tolerance in The Moor's Last Sigh. The
Ground Beneath Her Feet sees Rushdie one again pillaging the
founding myths and stories of East and West from which he creates
an astonishing parable of the ways in which, as the title itself
suggests, even the ground beneath our feet is not as stable as we
might like to think.
Rushdie has always been fascinated by contemporary culture and
in particular cinema, most brilliantly evoked in Shame and his
non-fiction. The Ground Beneath Her Feet finds Rushdie immersed
in the world of rock 'n' roll, so successfully that one of the
novel's spinoffs has been the of Rushdie's lyrics by
U2. Vina Apsara, Greek-American t, and Ormus Cama, son of a
disillusioned Bombay lawyer and Anglophile, meet in 1950s Bombay,
creating one of the most tortuous but enduring rock partnerships
which spans the next 40 years. With Rushdie's usual breathtaking
panache, the story of their families and histories unfold as the
narrative develops, recounted by Umeed Merchant, aka Rai,
photographer and sometime lover of Vina. Rai recounts the on-off
relationship between Vina and Ormus as he moves across the
trouble-spots of the world, photographing upheavals and
atrocities, before securing the ultimate final picture of Vina,
swallowed by the earthquake which opens the book, and which
recurs throughout the novel like the guitar riffs which the baby
Ormus plays as he first emerges from the womb.
Cannibalising the stories of classical history, the novel offers
an updating of the myth of Orpheus, the greatest of all
musicians, and his doomed wife, Eurydice. Transmuted from Greece,
via India, and thrown into the postmodern world of rock and roll,
Rushdie weaves a magical narrative of the melding of East and
West, in song and in story, as the novel careers across the
globe. From a wonderfully comic portrayal of London in the
swinging sixties, to the sex and drugs and rock n roll of New
York in the seventies, Rushdie's canvas grows more ambitious than
ever, held together by the love triangle of Vina, Ormus and Rai
and its final tragic unravelling, as the ground moves beneath
their feet in one final ironic twist.
The Ground Beneath Her Feet finds Rushdie at the height of his
powers, exploring love, loss, migration, displacement and the
seismic effects of cultural difference. As one of the many songs
that Rushdie weaves into his story goes, "I know it's only rock n
roll, but I like it." --Jerry Brotton