Ganja Growing in the Tin

It must have seemed like a good idea at the onset: Why not retell the mythic story of Orpheus and Eurydice, this time casting the principals as international pop/rock stars? Ergo Salman Rushdie's sixth novel, The Ground Beneath Her Feet (Henry Holt; 575 pages; $27.50), which recounts the fabulous lives and careers of the singer-composer Ormus Cama and his beloved co-vocalist Vina Apsara, as remembered by their mutual friend, the news photographer Umeed ("Rai") Merchant. His opening sentence foretells Vina's death--she was swallowed up by an earthquake in Mexico in 1989--and Rai presents himself as a narrator with a mission: "I have chosen to tell our story, hers and mine and Ormus Cama's, all of it, every last detail, and then maybe she can find a sort of peace here, on the page, in this underworld of ink and lies, that respite which was denied her by life."

That "all of it, every last detail" seems a tad superfluous; readers who haul this hefty novel onto their lap will already have guessed that they're in for a long trek. And for quite a while the journey seems enchanting indeed. Rai's account of his and Ormus' Bombay childhood becomes a pageant of Dickensian, subcontinent eccentrics, particularly the boys' diversely obsessed parents.

Ormus shows weird promise as a young man. For complicated reasons, he is able to go into trances and somehow hear popular songs two years, eight months and 28 days (or 1,001 nights) before anyone else in the world. Ormus has a problem receiving the lyrics ("The ganja, my friend, is growing in the tin; the ganja is growing in the tin"), but no one doubts that he possesses a peculiar gift, least of all Vina Apsara, who meets Ormus in a record store and realizes that the two of them will make beautiful music together. Rai explains: "For she is--will be--Dionysiac, divine, and so is--so will--he."

Bombay is obviously too small to hold these two myth-destined figures, and Rai decides to get out as well. ("Disorientation: loss of the East," as he notes several times.) But this exodus considerably saps the narrative vigor of Rushdie's novel. On their arc toward pop immortality, Ormus and Vina must inevitably pass through London in the mid-'60s and Manhattan in the '70s, already over-storied places and times about which Rai (and Rushdie) can find little new or interesting to add. When fictionalized versions of Rudolf Nureyev and Andy Warhol start popping up, an inspired fiction dwindles toward gossip.

No novelist currently writing in English does so with more energy, intelligence and allusiveness than Rushdie. Nearly every page of The Ground Beneath Her Feet offers something to arrest a devoted reader's attention: puns and wordplays galore ("Ma, keep mum"; "Where was a penthouse pent?") and enough literary echoes--of Joyce; Yeats; Frost; Dante; oh hell, of nearly everybody--to keep graduate students on the prowl through these pages for years. But for all of Rushdie's brilliance, the parts of this novel seem greater than the sum of its whole.