Maestros singing from a very different song sheet

An Equal Music by Vikram Seth (Phoenix House: #16.99) The Ground Beneath Her Feet by Salman Rushdie (Jonathan Cape: #18) Great minds think alike or fools seldom differ? In the case of Salman Rushdie and Vikram Seth, it's moderate brains exploring and indulging their arch passion: music. But the similarities end here; the two novels could not be more different.

Rushdie, drawing inspiration from much eastern poetry, is concerned with opening doors. The central metaphor of Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat, for example, is stated in terms of opening the door as a gateway to understanding, love and fulfilment. The Ground Beneath Her Feet is an epic attempt to open numerous doors, as though one were walking through the elaborate and extensive passage way of the famous Badshahi mosque in Lahore - the moment you walk through one door, another presents itself, then another, then another. And Rushdie takes great pleasure in opening the doors to parallel worlds, Greek and Indian myths, geological interiors, inner parts of mute characters and much else besides. In contrast, all doors, emotional as well as intellectual, remain firmly closed in An Equal Music.

Seth's novel is like the interior of a tomb: locked, claustrophobic and with a stench of decay. The narratives contrast just as sharply. Rushdie inhabits a labyrinthine domain, a realm of migration and transformation, hybrid and magical characters, where boundaries merge and all distinction between history and fable evaporate. It is a familiar territory for readers of Rushdie's earlier novels. Indeed, in places, The Ground Beneath Her Feet looks like it has been written by numbers. So, true to Rushdie's obsession with naming, the names of characters are codes whose significance we are told in great detail. Thus the narrator, Umeed Merchant Rai, conveys triple layers of meaning. Umeed means hope and tells us that our twisted narrator is forever hopeful; Merchant, meaning businessman, reveals that his father was a property developer; and Rai, meaning music, suggests that music is telling the tale which, at its core, is a rock'n'roll love story. Rai, a famed photojournalist, was born in 1947, the year of India's independence. An event junkie who becomes invisible, he leaves India to seek fame in the West. He is in love with Vina Apsara, a mega popstar with a global sexual appetite. Vina, a product of devastated childhood, is half-Indian, half-American, as well as a neat amalgam of Madonna, Princess Diana and Germaine Greer to boot. She is also loved by another pop star, the composer-performer Ormus Cama, son of Parsi Anglophiles Lady Senta and Sir Darius Xerxes Cama. The dashingly handsome Ormus, who is haunted by the death of his twin brother, has two older twin brothers, Virus and Cyrus. Virus is hit by a devastating shot from the bat of Sir Darius during an agitated cricket match and becomes a mute mystic. Cyrus grows up to become a mass murderer. Ormus becomes a DJ, cuts a single, has a car crash and develops double vision which enables him to see parallel worlds. Vina and Ormus form a rock group. Ormus wants to marry Vina; but she agrees to marry him only after 10 years. While Ormus stays celibate during this period, Vina sleeps with everyone, particularly Rai. When Vina dies in a South American earthquake - on St Valentine's day no less, the day of the famous fatwa - Ormus thinks she is reincarnated as Mira, a young singer. He re-starts the group with Mira as the lead singer. This is, of course, textbook magical realism. But there are a couple of surprises for Rushdie devotees. The first is his discovery of sex - or rather embarrassingly graphic sex. The other is the novel's accessibility. Both the myths of Orpheus and Eurydice that Rushdie retells, and the world of rock'n'roll that he uses as a metaphor for a shifting world, will be more familiar to his Western readers than the terrain of Midnight's Children and The Satanic Verses. And there is some enjoyment to be had from Rushdie's inventive history of the rise to rock stardom of Vina and Ormus and their band VTO, complete with their love songs, protest songs and elaborate discographies. The Ground Beneath Her Feet has several narratives running in parallel and in tangents and numerous characters etched out on a global panorama. In contrast, Vikram Seth's An Equal Music is a simple story of love, loss and belonging that is firmly located in London. Indeed, most of its action is confined to a small room of a small mews house where its characters, the members of the Maggiore Quartet, meet regularly to rehearse and shut out the existence of the outside world. But the micro world of the quartet is an extraordinarily ordinary terrain. They watch teletubbies, drive the Ford Ka and worry about their ageing cats. They love music with all their passions, but are incapable of love and passion. They can communicate with their music, but cannot otherwise communicate at all; both literally and metaphorically, they can hear only partially and then often mishear. The focus of the novel is the stress and strain, personal and musical, between the four members of the quartet. Michael Holme, the second violinist and narrator of the novel, exists in perpetual limbo, regretting the loss of his pianist lover Julia and worrying about his origins in boring Rochdale. He is a loner who puts up with his girlfriend, Virginie, out of laziness and lust. His only joy is an eighteenth century Tononi violin, on loan from a rich patron. Other members of the quartet include the gentle Helen who is heavily into New Age things; her homosexual and caustic brother, Piers; and the chubby composer Billy, who loves biscuits and music in equal measure. The outer world intervenes in this cosily alienated domain in the shape of Julia. Michael, sitting on the top floor of a bus stuck in a traffic jam, spots her on a bus directly opposite. The balance of the quartet is threatened, and Michael is faced with new conflicts, or rather old struggles in new shapes. He gets to visit Vienna with Julia but only ends up with a nervous breakdown. AN Equal Music is as boring and unmoving as the lives of its characters. Seth pays for populating his novel with so many emotional dwarfs. He still has an eye for detail, for that acute observation that made A Suitable Boy such a pleasure; but this time, the details are so mundane, so banal that they fail to ignite the reader's interest. Anyway, how far can one go to appreciate the clinical nature of self- destructive cruelty? So given the common background of the two authors, their common postmodern concerns and a common theme, why is Rushdie partially enjoyable while Seth comes a total cropper? The answer is that Rushdie delivers more of the same and thoroughly enjoys himself in the process. Seth tries to be different, finds the process rather laborious and fails. The difference can be seen in the narrators of the two novels. Rai, the voice of The Ground Beneath Her Feet, the "ungodly forbidden sound of joy", is perhaps one of Rushdie's best creations: witty and sceptical, he is at once engaging and involving. From the moment we meet him we are mercilessly sucked into his magical world and the novel, just like, Vina is swallowed by the earthquakes in the opening chapter. No one, on the other hand, would give a damn for Michael Holme and his confusing introspection. He is as cruel to others as he is to himself, has no dress or any other sense, and even though he is supposed to play with great sensitivity and emotion, he is an emotional cripple. Since we don't care much about him, we can hardly care about the novel. Whereas Seth's London is stale, Rushdie's Bombay is enchanted pluralism. Seth has no feeling for London (or for Vienna); but Rushdie's love of Bombay manifests itself in its global projection, in its use as a metaphor for both pluralistic existence and hybridity. The protagonists of The Ground Beneath Her Feet are not just from Bombay, they take their Bombay with them where ever they go, not infrequently falling into its garbage argot, "Hug-me" - a mixture of Hindi, Urdu, Gujarati, Marathi, English. The Bombayfication of Greek myths, rock history, geological activity and everything else under the sun is quite bewitching. You don't have to know anything about the city to be entranced. In comparison, the emotional sterility of An Equal Music succeeds only in alienating the reader. But both novels are trying to convey the same postmodern message - that art is all there is and all that matters. Seth represents the lives of his characters as a counterpart to the joy and suffering experienced by the composers whose music they play so passionately. For Rushdie, the way out from "the way it is" - the words of an Ormus song - is to tell another story. The world will be a humane and just place as long as you can tell a story, and another, and another. Most of the doors that Rushdie tries to open are already ajar; and unfortunately, his other worlds do little to illuminate the human predicament. The notion of art as a universal theory of deliverance just does not wash. Come on, Maestro. Play a different tune. Ziauddin Sardar is editor of Futures Journal and author of several Introducing... books on Muhammed, Mathematics, Cultural Studies, published by Icon. lSalman Rushdie: Magazine, Page 6

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