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Title: Dazzling language, lame story
Review: The Ground Beneath Her Feet was written during a fairly miserable time for fiction (I can think of few really great novels from the mid 90s). Rushdie, having covered the main territories of his life - India, Pakistan, Immigration in three tour de force novels, and followed it up with the mixed Moors Last Sigh, was clearly in search of a topic. What he produced is a bunging in of a lot of high/low cultural references which was all the rage at the time, a dubious plot based on the Orpheus myth, and a lot - a lot of self indulgent passages on a questionable filigree of cultural canvas that piece together in a colourful riot of a novel, but without much grist to the mill. The characters are a sort of modern Gods Behaving Badly - a similar device used in Melanie Philip's eponymous recent novel of same name. Neither book really swings it for me I'm afraid.
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