The Ground Beneath Her Feet [Paperback]

The book comes back to the ground beneath our feet all the time - characters have it removed from beneath them by natural forces, by the despair of unrequited love, by betrayal of trust, by a lack of god or gods or idols to believe in. This is a world of uncertainties and dislocations.

Perhaps the greatest strength of the book is the third character, Rai, who watches and narrates this great mythic story. A childhood friend, successful photographer, and Vina's secret lover. In these roles and as narrator of this story he is an outsider - detached from the main picture; a watcher. Successful, well known himself, but also regretful of lost opportunities. He lives a good life, but not a mythically great one. It is easy to see elements of Rushdie in Rai, and in the artist rock star Ormus, who withdraws himself from the world.

I enjoyed this novel. It is very readable, often vivid and spectacular. It isn't a great novel, and I have this slight sense of Rushdie straining sometimes to find new things to say, and to engage fully with contemporary popular culture. Rushdie might just be developing a career path that shows a gentle decline from a glorious peak. But it is worthy and worth reading, and I could be wrong.

It's a book with massive scope, providing us with a vivid sense of time and place as it stretches across more than fifty years and most of the globe. It's not only a love story and an exploration of mythology and the world of rock'n'roll, but an exciting and richly-woven tale of interlinked families, and along the way it deals with all sorts of unusual-but-interesting concepts, from the goat industry to pirate radio.

It's certainly not perfect. Though the three main characters are complex, it's overwhelming singular frustrating personality traits that are usually in evidence. We lose hope of seeing Vina as anything other than a diva, Ormus anywhere other than lost in his own world (literally!), Rai as anything but pathetic, though we sympathise with all of them. Further, all of them possess talents too extreme to make them believable: perhaps they're meant to be seen as the heroes of myths but this is hard to keep in mind, considering the book's mostly-realistic setting.

Their tale rambles and repeats, the pace flags and passages reek of "See how intelligent I, Salman Rushdie, am! I am mighty, and therefore I shalt get away with discussing pretentious notions that you ordinary mortals would never dare voice to your mates down the pub!" However, spookily, whenever I was thinking "Whatever happened to name_of_secondary_character? I want to see more of them", they'd be back in the next section. And the novel is undeniably a feat. It's impossible not to be left in awe of Rushdie's knowledge, the humour in his rewritten history of rock, the way he interests us in the most irrelevant of subplots, the atmosphere he evokes of politically-troubled India, acid-addled 60s Britain and even the airspace above the Iron Curtain, the thrilling twists, and the deft-handling of the rock world - we're shown Rushdie has the ability to write indulgently of its luxury and decadence, but instead chooses to allow many aspects of the characters' lives to be focussed upon. These aren't seamlessly bound together, but most of the strands are enjoyable enough separately.

I hear most of Rushdie's other novels are better, so I'll be moving on to them, but I believe this one's worth the (very long) read.

But if you can't be doing with semiology, The Ground Beneath Her Feet also provides a rollicking tour through popular culture. With witty associations and an abundant imagination, Rushdie comes up with a very enjoyable way to spend a few hours.

Gavin Jackson