It’s hard to be sure which images are being claimed as fantasy and which are in the portrayal as real world and solid but the divine taker is tangible, a kraken of chaos under the lake with one eye open. Chaos is interested though in the lead characters as their demi-god level of talent calls to it like Sauron’s ring. The scope of this novel is amazing, an expanse, a plethora of material populated by so many allusions and metaphors that half of them will be lost on the readers classical influence with myth-laden story-telling, strongly hinting at the intangible barriers between our illusion of stable reality and what chaos is lurking around us, like a tiger shadowing us from the other side and waiting for us to step off the beaten path. All the while though, Rushdie populates their surroundings with oddities, mangled successes of commerce, family tragedies and murderous relatives that they somehow have to absorb into their identities. It’s the aspirational fantasy held by global youth contrasted with their origins in a more spiritual and non-commercial (equally fantasy) place. The challenge of this book is to reconcile what the ever changing India is and means, as derived from the India of this generation’s parents and grandparents. The trappings of fame eventually force one of the protagonists to become like Howard Hughes or Michael Jackson, living a cloistered existence behind their gilded gates, afraid to breathe the same air as us, endlessly repeating videos on too many screens. ethnic squabbling that still pervades humanity like the common cold. Then there’s an unsettling connection to the contemporary Indian calamity that would have been fresh at the time this was written, the massacre at the Golden Temple of Amritsar, i.e. The Ground Beneath Her Feet is a particularly extended fable, including elements of fame culture, divine and awesome natural talent (see also Jesus) bound and hobbled by vested commercial interests, an interface between the modern myths (Klingons, the language of Mordor) and the mystical heritage of the characters, the metaphor of the cataract rending the ground asunder and dragging the unworthy (or too good to be allowed to walk the Earth any longer) down to the chaos and underworld that exists just beneath the surface of human experience, returning a character to the ownership of the gods.

The ground beneath her feet rushdie