Big-name novelists often see their stock plummet for a time, but Rushdie has arguably been doubly unlucky, since his entire product (to stretch the corporate analogy) has been devalued in recent years. Magic Realism, the fictional style with which he is associated, does not occupy the lofty space it once did in literature. Part of this decline can be traced to inferior imitators; Midnight’s Children (1981), like Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms or Heller’s Catch-22, is written with a piquant style which, for some time after you have read the book, seems like the ideal one for fiction. It inspired a generation of authors, many of whom lacked Rushdie’s intellect and verbal facility; the next batch of magic-realist fiction, therefore, was frequently mired in cliché and an excess of irksome modifiers, and the fairy-tale stories contained nothing deeper within. These later novels were no longer literature but were more often the kind of book that has a whimsical title and is described as ‘life-affirming’ by Richard and Judy.

Partly, too, Rushdie has lost out following a change in reading habits. People want to commune eye-to-eye with artists now; they want to read prose which they could, at a stretch, write, and stories which they can either ‘relate to’ or at least comprehend without effort. Rushdie’s work is not in that category; you can’t relate to an angel falling ‘in moonlight as he sang his impromptu gazal […] adopting heraldic postures, rampant, couchant’, and you probably can’t write it, either. It is telling that in 1993 Midnight’s Children received the award for the best Booker-winner in 25 years, but when it was announced that there would be award this year for the best winner in 40 years, the immediate favourite was not Midnight’s Children’s but Life of Pi, Yann Martel’s feather-light 2002 novel.

The Enchantress of Florence, which Rushdie worked on for seven years, is the author’s best book since The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995). It is not without flaws; as with his previous novel, Shalimar the Clown (2005), there is an occasional feel of determinism in the plotting — a sense of string-pulling in the inexorable convergence of the Mughal and Florentine strands. History should not be written as if the past were always coasting towards the present, and historical fiction should also, for drama’s sake if for nothing else, observe that rule. However, it is not such an evident problem in this novel, not least because the structure is less thriller-like than that of Shalimar, where our early ability to perceive the outcome undercuts some of the enjoyment of its unfolding.

Rushdie’s latest work is convincing and funny, less manic in its prose than earlier novels but still ambitiously written, and with a seriousness beneath its silliness. As with most fairy-tales, it keeps very little of the main plot hidden, but if we can generally see where we are heading when we read it, the view here, at least, is a beautiful one.

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