Black Orpheus

The high-concept word on the street on Salman Rushdie’s latest novel, “The Ground Beneath Her Feet,” was Orpheus and Eurydice as a couple of rock ‘n’ roll stars. You remember Orpheus, the lyre virtuoso whose music not only moved man and beast but made the very rocks and waters shake, rattle and roll. The groom who mourned the untimely death of his bride so intensely that he braved a trip to Hades to beg a second verse for Eurydice. The crooner who charmed the King of the Underworld into granting his request on the single condition that he not look back at his nymph until both had reached the surface. The man who, like most musicians, had no patience.

Word also was that Rushdie was hanging with U2, even writing songs with Bono, to get the pu of rock ‘n’ roll. So it was no wonder, as we turned to the first page of Rushdie’s novel, that visions of Cocteau’s film “Orphee,” with its Elvis-era motorcycles and wrap-around shades, danced like marrons glaces through our heads.

And to a certain extent, Rushdie delivers on both vision and concept. His Orpheus is one Ormus Cama, born in Bombay in 1937 to Sir Darius and Lady Spenta Cama, a family of Anglophiliac Parsis. Eurydice is Vina Apsara, born in the USA to an Indian butcher and a Greek American mother, who finds herself, at age 12, sent to distant relatives of her father, only to fall unavoidably in love with 19-year-old Ormus in a Bombay record store.

Despite the twists and turns of natural and human faults, Ormus and Vina become the Ike and Tina, the John and Yoko, the Kantner and Slick (but thankfully not the Sonny and Cher) of post-Sinatra pop. Between Vina’s voice and Ormus’ music, they channel the zeitgeist of a fracturing world, as the ‘60s flip into the ‘90s, and turn it into platinum. Until one day, the Earth breaks for good. On Valentine’s Day 1989, while Vina is on tour in Mexico, the ground beneath her feet opens and drags our Eurydice-in-sequins into an underworld just south of Puerto Vallarta. And our Orpheus follows into 10 years of living hell.

But Rushdie is too good a writer to damn us to such a simplistic remake. King of the myth-cegenists, he cross-pollinates the myths of East and West--Hindu and Muslim, Greece and Rome, Memphis and Liverpool--and plays more riffs on Orpheus and Eurydice than Cocteau and Gluck (not to mention Clapton and Allman) combined. Out to double our pleasure, double our fun, Rushdie doubles Orpheus and Eurydice with yet another theme--twins. Imagine the possibilities.

Ormus--in just one example--has not only a pair of twins for brothers but also a dead twin of his own, Gayomart, stillborn just minutes before Ormus entered at his heel. Ormus owes his early musical success, in fact, to his ability to channel dead Gayo’s consonantless humming of hit tunes 1,001 nights before they hit the hit parade. Thanks to his dead twin, Ormus also has visions of movies yet to come, the films of Fellini and Bergman, their characters pleading to him from the limbo of the silver screen to do an Orpheus and free them. “Less glamorous than the hall of uncreated film and television characters is the room of unmade stage roles, and tawdrier still is the parliament chamber of future betrayals, and the saloon bar of uninvented books, and the back alley of uncommitted crimes, until finally there is just a series of narrow iron steps descending into pitch blackness, and Ormus knows his twin brother is down there, waiting, but he’s too afraid to descend.”

Rushdie has borrowed duality--one of the great Ur-themes of East and West, North and South--for much of his writing before. But in “The Ground Beneath Her Feet,” he borrows (from Borges’ and his sci-fi precursors) the ultimate twin--a twin Earth, a parallel planet that revolves with a history and population very much, but not quite, like our own. The Earth of Ormus and the Earth of Gayo both include people named Winston Churchill and John F. Kennedy, for example. But in one, the Kennedy dodges a Dallas bullet in a decade that hears Carly Simon and Guinevere Garfunkel sing “The Sounds of Silence.” In this novel world, Kurt Vonnegut’s fictional Kilgore Trout and Philip Roth’s Nathan Zuckerman are real novelists, and “Don Quixote” really was written by Borges’ own Pierre Menard.

Within all this confusion, Rushdie suggests, at the core of all these doubled myths and trembling earths, beneath the feet of writers and musicians, bubbles an Ur-question:

“Death is more than love or is it. Art is more than love or is it. Love is more than death and art, or not. This is the subject. This is the subject. This is it.” It is a signal of Rushdie’s supreme confidence that these are statements, the Ur-question mark having gone the way of the Mysterians. And it is also a signal of Rushdie’s recent, tentative return from his own 10 years of hell, dating to the same Valentine’s Day of 1989 of Vina’s disappearance, when, thanks to the fatwa of Ayatollah Khomeini, the ground opened beneath Rushdie’s own feet. Like Ormus, Rushdie has spent the last decade dashing between two universes. Yet Rushdie’s stand-in as narrator of “The Ground Beneath Her Feet” is not the musician but a photographer and childhood friend of both Ormus and Vina, who bears the optimistic name of Umeed Merchant, which translates directly as Hope Seller.

Part Avedon, part Capa and all paparazzo, Umeed (or Rai, as he comes to be known) is as smitten with Vina as is Ormus. And as Rai grows older, he comes to share not only Vina’s bed but also the polyglot mixture of Hindustani, Urdu, English and the other languages from the many worlds that made up their childhood Bombay.

It is sad and surprising that this language, the language of “The Ground Beneath Her Feet,” is its chief fault and threatens a rupture of the entire novel. Rai, like the hero of Rushdie’s previous “The Moor’s Last Sigh,” is so enamored of his ability to pun across several languages that he spends much of the first 100 pages of the book taking the reader on a Berlitz course by way of explaining a few weak jokes.

And bad explanation isn’t limited to the humor. “Murder is a crime of violence against the murdered person. Suicide is a crime of violence against those who remain alive,” says Rai in a fit of Gibran-esque philosophy. “India, I have swum in your warm waters and run laughing in your high mountain meadows,” Rai cries as he leaves his native land. “Oh, why must everything I say end up sounding like a filmi gana, a goddamn cheap Bollywood song?” Unfortunately, self-awareness doesn’t work as a defense in the court of literature.

The fluid confidence with which Rushdie read us Haroun’s sea of stories has been replaced by a nervous insistence that we know absolutely what he wants us to feel, what he wants us to find witty or clever or uproariously earth-shattering. The effect is that both pathos and humor come to us at a distance, as if through a tear into an alternative Earth.

One wonders whether the man who can write with the power of a Schwarzenegger and the humor of a DeVito, who as author of “Midnight’s Children” and “The Satanic Verses” has proved himself one of the greatest living novelists in the English language, turned over at least half of this novel to a Rushdie from another planet, an author who looks over his shoulder to make sure we get it. And we know what looking over his shoulder got Orpheus.