Novel: The Ground Beneath Her Feet

Overview
Salman Rushdie reimagines the Orpheus and Eurydice myth against the sprawling backdrop of the late 20th-century pop-music world. The story follows the meteoric rise of rock star Ormus Cama and the magnetic presence of his muse, Vina Apsara, and is narrated by a close friend who records their lives, loves, triumphs and losses. Music becomes the novel's underworld, fame its perilous descent, and mythmaking the force that both elevates and erases human beings.
Rushdie blends myth, history and sensational popular culture into a modern fable about how stories are made and how art can transform pain into legend. The narrative moves fluidly between personal intimacy and global spectacle, treating pop songs like sacred texts and chart success like prophecy.

Plot and Structure
The plot traces the intertwined careers and relationships of Ormus and Vina from childhood through superstardom and beyond. Ormus emerges as a brilliant, charismatic musician whose songs captivate a global audience, while Vina functions as his muse, collaborator and enigmatic lover. Their partnership, both creative and romantic, becomes the axis around which fame and tragedy revolve.
The narrator, a lifelong friend and chronicler, reconstructs episodes from their lives with a mix of reportage, lyrical reminiscence and imagined songs and lyrics. Episodes range from backstage scenes and recording sessions to intimate recollections and public spectacles, punctuated by the tragic event that reframes their story and forces questions about memory, responsibility and myth.

Characters
Ormus Cama is the archetypal Orpheus: mesmerizing, devoted to his craft and capable of transforming private longing into public art. Vina Apsara, the Eurydice figure, is beautiful, elusive and fiercely creative; she inspires devotion and bewilderment in equal measure. The narrator inhabits the perspective of a witness and mourner, someone whose affection and jealousy both complicate his account.
Secondary figures , bandmates, managers, lovers and media personalities , populate the orbit of fame, showing how celebrity is a communal construct built from applause, gossip and commodified memory. Rushdie's characters move between vulnerability and mythic projection, always at risk of being consumed by the stories others tell about them.

Themes
Central themes include love and loss, the transformation of personal pain into public myth, and the seductive danger of fame. Music functions as both language and mythology, a medium that turns ordinary experience into ritual. The novel interrogates authorship and authenticity, asking who has the right to narrate a life and how memory reshapes the past.
Diaspora and cultural hybridity appear subtly in the characters' backgrounds and in the novel's global settings, suggesting that modern myths are transnational, created from fractured histories and mass media. Rushdie explores how art attempts to resurrect the lost and whether such resurrections honor or distort the dead.

Style and Significance
Rushdie's prose is exuberant, densely allusive and often playful, incorporating invented song lyrics, pastiches of rock journalism and mythic asides. The narrative voice mixes elegy with irony, giving the novel both emotional depth and intellectual slyness. The result is a meditation on storytelling itself: the music industry supplies the melody, but myth supplies its meaning.
Regarded as a bold fusion of pop culture and classical myth, the novel challenges conventional biographical and realist forms. It asks readers to consider how modern celebrities are myth-makers and how myths, once formed, outlive their creators.