COLETTE'S LIST

Book Reviews Writ Loud

by Colette Bancroft

Shake, Rattle & Roll

ONE OF THE GLORIES of Salman Rushdie's novels is that you cannot sum them up in a phrase. The Ground Beneath Her Feet has been widely described as a recasting of the ancient myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, and indeed it is that, but describing it that way is about as accurate as saying The Satanic Verses is a book about a plane crash.

Rushdie's new novel is a paean to rock and roll and a sly dissection of the contemporary cult of celebrity, an aching elegy for the India of his youth and a keen-eyed tour of the United States in the 80s and 90s, a compassionate study of the many forms families take, a fiction about the making of fiction, a story of love and death.

Rushdie's Orpheus and Eurydice are Ormus Cama and Vina Apsara, international rock stars and legendary lovers. The richly complex tale of their lives and deaths, stretching across three continents and 50 years, is told by their lifelong friend Umeed "Rai" Merchant. Rai is the one left behind to tell the tale -- he even says at one point, "Call me Ishmael" -- though he protests that words are not his medium; he is a photographer by trade. He's too modest; as Rushdie's voice, he's a consummate storyteller, and his own life serves as the anchor to Ormus' and Vina's extravagant tales.

Rushdie creates appropriately mythic backgrounds for the lovers. Vina is American, the daughter of a Greek-American woman named (what else?) Helen and an Indian lawyer who abandons his family. Her mother's second husband is -- no kidding -- a goatherd; when Vina is 10, her mother snaps and murders her husband and all her children except Vina, then hangs herself in the goat shed. Vina survives because she is out in the woods singing "Shake, rattle and roll"; by the time we read this, we know Vina will die in an earthquake. Sent off to live with various family members, she ends up with one of her father's relatives in Bombay, where she will become a foster daughter to Rai's parents and meet her fate.

That would be Ormus Cama, son of a prominent Anglophile Bombay attorney named Sir Darius Xerxes Cama and his sweet but not awfully bright wife, Lady Spenta. Like Elvis, Ormus has a stillborn twin brother; he has two older brothers, also twins, one a beatific brain-damaged mute, the other a brilliant and charming serial killer who begins that career by trying to smother Ormus when the boy is five years old because he can't bear Ormus' beautiful singing voice. Clearly, in this story, the power of song is a matter of life and death.

Ormus doesn't sing again until 14 years later, after he and Vina meet in a record shop. Rai has met her first and is already, for life, in love with her, but a mere mortal hasn't got a chance when a god meets a goddess.

Vina is only 12. Ormus is 19, every bit as beautiful as she and already a storied seducer, but he vows to wait for her, not to touch her until her 16th birthday. Their ecstatic love is expressed in music until then; after they share one night together, Vina has a terrible fight with Rai's mother and leaves Bombay, dropping out of sight as completely as she will when the earth swallows her years later.

It will be years before they are reunited. Ormus' career has several false starts; he goes to England in the 60s just in time for the heyday of pirate radio and British rock. There, he suffers a Bob Dylanesque accident that leaves him in a coma for three years until, like Sleeping Beauty, he is awakened by his true love's kiss.

Out of Vina and Ormus' reunion is born VTO, a rock band that takes the world by storm. Their biggest album, "Quakershaker," outsells everything but "Sergeant Pepper." Vina boasts the aggressive politics of Joan Baez or Bonnie Raitt, the tough-babe stance and rowdy appetites of Janis Joplin and the penchant for talking publicly about her omnivorous sex life of the prematernal Madonna. After her death (which occurs in the opening chapter, so I'm not giving anything away here), there is an international outpouring of grief that echoes that over Princess Diana's death, and the Vina imitators outnumber Elvis', complete with Young Vinas and Older Vinas, women and men.

Ormus, like Bruce Springsteen, endures a prolonged battle over the rights to his songs (and appears on the cover of Time and Newsweek in the same week). Like John Lennon, he fights an attempt to deport him because of his politics and moves into a landmark New York apartment building, on whose doorstep he will die. Like Pete Townsend, he goes deaf because of his own music.

In other ways, he is quite unlike most rock stars. For one thing, when Vina agrees to marry him only after a 10-year engagement, he makes a vow of celibacy -- and keeps it. For another, Ormus is literally a visionary. All his life, he is in touch with another world. In childhood dreams, his dead twin sings songs to him, songs that turn up later on other people's records. After his accident, he begins to see glimpses of another world, a parallel place similar to but not the same as his own, through what he calls tears in reality.

In Ormus and Vina's world, the singer from Tupelo is named Jesse Garon Parker; when the U.S. goes to war in Vietnam, so does Britain; when an assassin fires at John Kennedy in Dallas from the grassy knoll, he misses and is wrestled to the ground by an amateur photographer named Abraham Zapruder, and Kennedy lives; "The Watergate Affair" is a popular novel with an imaginary character named Richard Nixon. The world that Ormus keeps seeing is the world that we, the readers, live in, the real world -- or maybe not.

This device rests lightly on the tale; Rushdie uses it chiefly to amplify one of his themes, the mystery and power of artistic creation, whether it is VTO's music, Rai's photographs or Rushdie's novel about them. Like the other mythical and magical-realism elements of the book, this one is grounded in the quotidian -- when Rai finally gets a communication from the other world, it turns up on a videotape.

The Ground Beneath Her Feet is not Rushdie's best book; that honor still goes, I think, to the astonishing Satanic Verses. The greatest weakness in "Ground," oddly, is that the music itself, the center of Ormus and Vina's achievement and romance, never quite comes alive. In most ways, Rushdie's mastery of detail and language makes everything else in the book vividly real. From the 60s hippie fashions in a boutique Ormus lives above to the bread he takes up baking in middle age, I could see and taste and smell his world, but I never really heard VTO in my head, and Ormus' lyrics pale beside Rushdie's prose. Perhaps that is intentional; Rai says of printed rock lyrics, "Set down on the page without their music, they seem kind of spavined, even hamstrung." Perhaps Rushdie chose to leave VTO's music to his readers' imaginations and tastes entirely, but in a book about rock 'n' roll, one longs to feel the beat.

In many other ways, though, The Ground Beneath Her Feet does move. Once again, it brings home the terrible, stupid irony of the fatwa against Rushdie, a sentence of death pronounced upon a writer with such a huge and humane heart, such wisdom, such joy in life.

The Satanic Verses

Though Rushdie was already an accomplished writer when it was published, The Satanic Verses made him a worldwide celebrity -- though certainly not in a fashion he would have wished. The book's notoriety because of its condemnation by radical Muslims has sadly overshadowed its achievement as one of the great novels of the latter half of this century. It is, simply, a superb book, breathtaking in its imaginative interweaving of different cultures, myths, religions and times.

It opens with a miracle: "Just before dawn one winter's morning, New Year's Day or thereabouts, two real, full-grown, living men fell from a great height, twenty-nine thousand and two feet, towards the English Channel, without benefit of parachutes or wings, out of a clear sky." The two are Gibreel Farishta, an Indian movie star, and Saladin Chamcha, an Anglophile chameleon businessman, and they survive their fall. That's only the beginning, though; soon Chamcha finds himself apparently metamorphosing into a demon, while Gibreel becomes more and more angelic. Their story cycles around others: that of Ayesha, leader of a pilgrimage and wearer of a cloak of living butterflies; that of Alleluia Cone, a British mountaineer obsessed with Everest; and that of the Prophet himself, Mahound, aka Mohammed (the portion of the tale that provoked the fatwa).

Wildly funny, extraordinarily beautiful, sharply satiric and entirely original, The Satanic Verses is one of those rare books that I simply did not want to finish; I wanted to stay in the world Rushdie created.

The Moor's Last Sigh

In The Satanic Verses and The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Rushdie examines the collision and transmutation of East and West, of the several different cultures in which he has spent his life. The Moor's Last Sigh focuses on his native land, India, and the family saga of Moraes "Moor" Zogoiby.

The Moor is himself something of a walking culture clash: His mother's family is Spanish and Christian, his father's Jewish, so that though both have lived in India for generations, the Moor seems always an outsider in the place he loves.

His family is a piece of work, particularly his mother, the unforgettable Aurora da Gama Zogoiby. A brilliant artist and highly unusual parent, Aurora wields language like a laser. She dominates a huge cast of characters, her husband Abraham, a powerful crime lord, and her son's life, even after he flees to Spain.

The book's intricate, compelling plot and intimate portrait of India are laced with humor that ranges from the most sophisticated satire to the fact that Aurora nicknames her children Ina, Minnie, Mynah and Moor. As always in Rushdie's work, the saga of the Zogoiby family is informed by the author's compassion and understanding of the human heart.

Bonus! Read The Keeper of Bees, the complete first chapter of The Ground Beneath Her Feet. And as always, this and other titles reviewed in Colette's List may be purchased at a significant discount from The Bookstall.

Colette's Archive

Colette's List 1: Hiaasen: Murder Under The Palms

Colette's List 2: Hall, MacDonald & More Murder

Colette's List 3: Crews: The Artist As Scar Lover

Colette's List 4: Mosley: Easy In The City Of Angels

Colette's List 5: Chandler: Trouble Is My Business

Colette's List 6: Mango, Mortal Sin & Margaritaville

Colette's List 7: A Monstrous Regiment of Women

Colette's List 8: The Inferno: James Ellroy's L.A.

Colette's List 9: Spenser Is Parker, Only Taller

Colette's List 10: Tony Hillerman: The Navajo Way

Colette's List 11: Small Towns, Mean Streets

Colette's List 12: James Lee Burke: Blood On The Bayou

Colette's List 13: Rick Harsch: Rust Belt Noir

Colette's List 14: Harrison: A Novel Worth Waiting For

Colette's List 15: Kingsolver: Power & Its Price

Colette's List 16: Macdonald: Secret Lusts & Terrible Revenge

Colette's List 17: Creating Colette: A Scandal In Paris

Colette Bancroft, a writer known at various times in her career to date as The Goddess of the Classroom, The Empress of Haute Cuisine and The Spitball Queen, is at work on a mystery novel of her own. She is an editor on the Metro Desk at the St. Petersburg Times.

---

A Not Entirely Disinterested Service of
Bancroft & Associates: Digital Publishers