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.

The Orpheus Framework

The decision to retell the Orpheus myth through rock and roll is one of Rushdie’s most inspired structural choices — not because rock and Orpheus are superficially similar, but because they share a deep structural logic. Orpheus is the singer whose art is so powerful it can move rocks, charm animals, and descend to the underworld; rock music, at its origin, was the art form that seemed to have precisely these qualities — a music that moved bodies, that seemed to come from somewhere below, that was associated with transgression, sex, and death.

Vina Apsara, who dies in an earthquake at the novel’s opening (it begins with her death, then rewinds to trace how she got there), is Eurydice: the beloved who goes below and cannot be retrieved. Ormus Cama, who can hear transmissions from a parallel world, is Orpheus: the singer who tries to reach what cannot be reached and is destroyed by the failure. Rai Merchant, the photographer-narrator, is the witness — the one who cannot save but can preserve.

The Alternate Rock History

In Rushdie’s version of the twentieth century, rock and roll’s development is different in specific ways: Ormus Cama is its true originator, a Bombay boy who dreamed the music before it existed in his world, and whose influence — mediated through encounters with the fictional versions of figures Rushdie invents — shapes the music’s evolution differently from our own history. The novel does not attempt to map its alternate history onto our own beat by beat, but the allusions are consistent enough that readers with knowledge of real rock history will recognise what Rushdie is doing.

The result is a meditation on originality and transmission — on where music comes from, whose music it originally was, and how creation and appropriation interact in a form born from the collision of African American and white American cultures.

Rushdie and Music

Music runs through Rushdie’s work more than is sometimes noticed: the Bollywood soundscape of Midnight’s Children, the pop culture references in The Satanic Verses, the specifically detailed music in this novel. The Ground Beneath Her Feet is the fullest expression of this engagement, and Bono of U2 — who wrote a song of the same title for the novel — was a friend of Rushdie’s during the writing. The novel belongs to a specific cultural moment in the late 1990s when the intersection of literary fiction and rock culture felt meaningful in a way it may not now.

Orpheus in the Age of Rock

The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999) retells the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice through the lens of rock and roll. Vina Apsara and Ormus Cama, a singer and a songwriter of almost mythic talent, rise out of Bombay to global fame, narrated by the photographer Rai who loves Vina from the margins. Rushdie reimagines the descent into the underworld as the seismic instability of an alternate twentieth century, with reality itself trembling beneath the lovers’ feet. U2’s Bono set the title lyric to music as a real single, folding the novel’s invented anthem back into the world that inspired it.