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The Enchantress of Florence

The magic lingers on

Salman Rushdie
Cape, 356pp, £18.99,

Simon Baker

Tuesday, 8th April 2008

At the beginning of Salman Rushdie’s new novel a charismatic Florentine rogue arrives at the Mughal court and claims to have a story which he must tell to the Emperor, Akbar the Great, who, he insists, is his nephew. The claim of kinship seems implausible, but Akbar’s older relatives admit that there is a family secret involving a pale-skinned, mythically beautiful princess named Qara Köz, who was born 100 years earlier and was given away in exchange for peace.

The Florentine, who boasts the elegant pseudonym ‘Mogor dell’Amore’ (‘Mughal of Love’), then weaves a tale of magic and warfare which begins with three childhood friends and eventually brings together two great civilisations. The friends (one of whom is Niccolò Machiavelli) are desperate for power and women; the most daring of them, Argalia, takes to the seas, and ends up a rich mercenary in the pay of the Turks. In one battle he defeats Shah Ismail of Persia and wins Qara Köz and her identical servant, known as ‘the Mirror’. Love blooms and a triumphant return to Florence caps Argalia’s life. This leaves only one question: since it happened almost a century ago, how can the youthful Mogor dell’Amore be Qara Köz’s son and, therefore, Akbar’s uncle?

The Enchantress of Florence melds history and fantasy. The real Akbar (1542-1605) was an intelligent ruler famed for his religious tolerance. The fictional one shares this but has some Rushdiean additions. For example, he employs a servant to compliment him (a man who ‘proudly held the rank of Imperial Flatterer First Class, and was a master of the ornate, old-school style known as cumulative fawning’). Akbar also conjured his favourite wife, Jodha, from his imagination into reality, a fact which understandably makes Jodha worry about the strength of her tenure on earth. Our ability to create fact from desire is a constant theme in this novel. A painter deliberately imagines himself to death when he falls in love with Qara Köz, his subject. Qara Köz is treated as a commodity by men, but in fact she is powerful, since she can control events with her mind; at one point she saves Argalia’s life by striking his pursuer down with crippling flatulence. One laughs at the absurdity of all this, but it is worth reflecting that none of it is markedly more absurd than the things which many accept as factual today; Rushdie’s novel reminds us that, when it comes to supernatural occurrences, ‘fantasy’ and ‘history’ are still divided by consensus rather than by a rigorous assessment of likelihoods.