There is Rushdie’s interesting and often funny technique of taking real characters from the history of these periods and changing them slightly. It is funky, fun, full of the life, colour, and sounds of India, London, New York, and filled with a plethora of sensual writing, of music, photography, art, dance, food – “the empire of the senses” as Ormus explores the rift in the real and Vina works towards self-discovery, while Rai chases both of them and eventually finds his own self in the demise of his obsessions.Īmidst the fun and word fest are some fascinating themes which work beautifully with the narrative, while almost shocking the reader into seeing things in a different way. The reader is drawn into the lives of Vina, Ormus and Rai, their strange love triangle and their ascendancy in the world of rock and roll and photography, and their struggles with meaning. Valentine’s Day, 1989, the last day of her life, the legendary popular singer Vina Apsara woke sobbing from a dream of human sacrifice in which she had been the intended victim”, it is difficult to stop reading the book. The Ground Beneath Her Feet is no tome, however. It manages, like many of the masters of the early 20th Century (Joyce, Faulkner, Woolf, Mann, all of whom are referenced), to simultaneously draw us into the narrative while broadening the language, using words to create new and original meaning. The story is both a comedy and a tragedy, both deconstructionalist and traditional in its form. The story is told by Rai Merchant, one of the 3 main protagonists in this epic rock and roll love tale which follows Rai’s lifelong love Vina Apsara and lifelong friend Ormus Camas in their own troubled love story, which is set primarily between the 1960s and the 1980s. The words play and trip and dive and move and stretch and pun and create new meaning while referencing everything we know from our children’s storybooks (Jungle Book, Wind in the Willows, Peter Pan, Wizard of Oz), music (from Buddy Holly to Aida), history (from the Mayflower to WWII to the partition of India) and great literature (from Aeschylus to Joyce) while reminding us constantly that we are in the world of fiction, and that this world is, in a way, no less real than the world around us. Love is the main hero of this novel which is about, among other things, love, loss, life, death, the lines between truth and fiction, beauty, and art. This was a sentiment with which we were all prepared to live.” So says the narrator and one of three main characters in Rushdie’s latest novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet.
It is love that is a sign of our humanity. “In the front lobby, carved into a stone wall, was a Latin motto.
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