Even when the novel begins to focus on the three-legged journey of Ormus, Vina and Rai, Rushdie veers off the main track, as though, not content with building a house he needs lots of out-buildings too. He says about his novel, Midnight’s Children, “I was thinking of India’s oral narrative traditions which were a form of storytelling in which digression was almost the basic principle; the storyteller could tell, in a sort of whirling cycle, a fictional tale, a mythological tale, a political story and an autobiographical story”
Rushdie’s mind is stuffed full of knowledge; a cornucopia of literature, philosophy, history, mythology, religion, and music which he pours out onto the page. There are passing references to:
Homer, Aristotle, Plato, Hamlet, Huxley (Brave New World), Voltaire (Candide), Amazing Grace, Alice in Wonderland, Dickens (Bleak House) Orwell (1984), The Beatles (Yesterday) Guys & Dolls, Lucky Jim, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Zen & The Art of Motor Cyle Maintenance, The Jungle Book, Ps 30 v5 is turned on its head (Weeping tarries for the night but joy comes in the morning) T S Eliot (p145. The Hollow Men, “Between the conception and the creation, Between the emotion and the response, fall the shadow”) Even Donald Trump gets an oblique look-in (p17: Zen and The Art of The Deal).
He says:
- “The idea was to take one of the great archetypal myths and to retell it in a way that makes sense now, in our time, in the world of rock music and fame.”
- “Pop culture creates its own gods and monsters, and I wanted to explore how those forces shape people's lives and their emotional realities.”
- “The book is about borderlessness—not just geographical but emotional and aesthetic too.”
- “I was interested in parallel realities—not science fiction, but the idea that what we think of as the real world is full of inconsistencies, distortions, and inventions.”
He has acknowledged the novel contains deeply personal elements, particularly in how it portrays loss and mourning. The title itself—The Ground Beneath Her Feet—evokes the sense of disorientation and collapse that comes from losing someone you love.
He also says:
“I have always been attracted to capacious, largehearted fictions, books that try to gather up large armfuls of the world”, books of the type that Henry James had called “loose, baggy monsters”,
Well, this was certainly a loose baggy monster. Too loose and too baggy for me. As I’ve said before, I am torn between being a rationalist and a romantic, so I enjoyed the tug-of-war between these ways of looking at human existence. Rai the rational observer of the irrational Ormus, with Vina oscillating between them both.
There are parallels with the German romantic Novalis. Ormus falls for 12 year-old Vina and “sees” another world; Novalis fell for 12 year-old Sophie von Khun and wrote: "One day, I felt the certainty of immortality, like the touch of a hand……As things are, we are the enemies of the world and foreigners to this earth."
Rushdie’s ability as a writer and story-teller are clear to see but the central plot line, the supposedly perfect and all-consuming love between Vina and Ormus was simply not believable. His attempt to recreate the Orpheus/Eurydice myth fell apart at this point.
I annotated my copy of the book vigorously. It helped to engage with the writing and also give vent to my frustrations and disagreements. Some comments I made were:
- Pretentious p279
- New age nonsense p326
- Love? Really! p383
- Just don't believe this idea - nonsense. P386
- Profound truth or gobbledegook? P389
- Skip - why include this? P390/391
- Perfection of love or more nonsense? P 424
- Over the top. P480
- Complete nonsense Rushdie! p482/483
- Too much navel gazing myth, philosophy - is this a novel or what? P502
- This book is dribbling into nothingness. P558
However, having struggled and fought my way through the book like a wanderer in a desert plodding towards the mirage of Vina and Ormus, the shifting sand beneath my feet, I found enough oases of enjoyment to keep on going.
0 comments:
Post a Comment