9 - The Ground Beneath Her Feet

Summary

The Ground Beneath Her Feet is that paradoxical thing, a novel about music and photography. Framed, filmed, and with full surround sound, it issues directly from – enacts, and tries to be part of – that thunderous, subversive, sexual, and heteroglossic musical scene that began in the late 1950s, rode the waves for two or three decades, and still keeps us afloat on its diversifying currents. Rushdie has said it is ‘the sound-track of my life’. In order to keep up with its subject, and its characters, the novel is written in a style that James Wood has unkindly but not unfairly described as ‘hysterical realism’, a development from Rushdie's earlier and still recognizable style, but ratcheted up by several degrees of hyperbole. It is louder, more gesticulatory, more high-pitched, more vulgar, and more omnivorous. Five pages into the first chapter, we are told by the excitable narrator Rai that ‘the legendary popular singer Vina Apsara’ (whom we have met in the first sentence) ‘looked stretched, unstable, too bright, as if she were on the point of flying apart like an exploding lightbulb, like a supernova, like the universe’ (GBF 7). The dilating scale is proclaimed unashamedly, and indeed this first proleptic chapter functions as an all-action ‘trailer’ to the novel which follows, introducing characters and themes with a clashing of symbols, an earthquake, and other big brassy notes. Newspapers ‘with their shrieking ink’ attend on ‘the whole appalling menagerie of the rock world’, written up by Rai in Rushdie's familiar ‘Hug-me, Hindu Urdu Gujarati Marathi English: Bombayites like me were people who spoke five languages badly and no language well ’ (GBF 4,11,7).

But though he evidently frets here within its archaic limitations, Rushdie has not quite forgotten that he is writing a novel; and there is plenty of literary superstructure to remind us of the fact. We are in Mexico, and it is Lawrence's plumed serpent Quetzalcoatl that writhes in the first paragraph. Vina's death deprives her ‘of the right to follow her life's verses to the final, fulfilling rhyme’ (GBF 5). Her deceased one-night stand, we are told, was speaking Orcish, ‘the infernal speech devised for the servants of the Dark Lord Sauron by the writer Tolkien’; whose own rhyme, ‘One ring to rule them all … ’ is then dutifully quoted (GBF 5,6).