The bloodyminded narrator who tries to do too much now makes even Midnight's Children hard going. To read the novel now is to read it without the excitement and novelty of finding the narrative techniques of Gunter Grass and Garcia Marquez adapted to India; and it is to realise that the problems of Rushdie as a novelist since then have been the problems of a novelist unable to break away from his own imitations and imitators. In later novels, where Rushdie was still trying to pull off the same big stylistic coup of Midnight's Children, social setting, character, and human connections were subordinated to big poster-bright themes: the ordeal of immigration, the death of the past, the encounter between the East and the West, the human condition, and that kind of thing. In Shame, he first assumed the now familiar tone ('May I interpose a few words here...') and inaugurated the tub-thumping ('I, too, know something of this immigrant business... Roots, I sometimes think, are a conservative myth'), which makes it hard now to recall, beyond the controversial bits, anything of The Satanic Verses, or The Moor's Last Sigh: they were miscellanies rather than novels, with authorial homilies on various problems faced by mankind filling up the hollow centre. The Ground Beneath her Feet rounds off the process: here, the authorial homilies are the centre, and everything else-story, characters, drama-has come to resemble aborted sublimations of the storyteller's obsessions, his prejudices and biases.