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Sunday 5 July 2009

‘We have been wimpish about defending our ideas’

Salman Rushdie tells Matthew d’Ancona that the idea at the heart of his new novel set in 16th-century Florence and India is that universal values exist and require robust champions

Not surprisingly, many have seen a thinly veiled simulacrum of Rushdie’s ex-wife in the novel’s hypnotic central figure, Qara Köz, a great beauty who transfixes men wherever she travels, and who is both revered as an enchantress and reviled as a witch. But the book does not really have the texture of a roman à clef. Its delight lies in a mixture of fairy tale, deep historical research, and an engagement with timeless philosophical questions.

The story hinges on the arrival at the court of the Mughal Emperor, Akbar the Great (1542–1605), of a mysterious Westerner calling himself Mogor dell’Amore (‘the Mughal of Love’) and claiming to be the Emperor’s uncle. He also has a tale to tell, about three Florentine friends: Niccolo Machiavelli, Agostino Vespucci (the man who identified Lisa Gherardini as the model for the ‘Mona Lisa’, and cousin of the famed explorer Amerigo) and Antonino Argalia, who goes on to command the armies of the Ottoman Sultan. All manner of vivid characters stalk these pages, including Savonarola, a prototypical version of the Three Musketeers and d’Artagnan, and even Dracula.

‘The interesting thing about history sometimes,’ says the author, ‘is that you know these people existed, and you knew what jobs they did but you don’t know much about them as people so you actually have to make them up. So the character of Ago Vespucci in the novel — I just made him up. But he was a pal and drinking buddy of Machiavelli’s and there is one rather sweet letter which exists, which he wrote to Machiavelli when Machiavelli was away on Florentine business, where he says ‘please come back soon because when you’re not here there is nobody to arrange the fun!’ He seems to have been the life and soul — the guy who decided which drinking hall, which whorehouse, which gambling den. So the idea of Machiavelli as a bon vivant is rather wonderful, and apparently true.’

Among other things, the novel is an implicit dialogue over the decades and across thousands of miles between Machiavelli, brooding over the nature of power and morality, and the troubled Akbar, pondering the same mysteries from his majestic palace. The action shifts across time and space, from Florence to Fatehpur Sikri, and back again. There is also much traffic across what Rushdie calls ‘the frontier of the real’, the Checkpoint Charlie of the imagination. Akbar has the power to dream into reality, notably his favourite wife, Jodha. Travelling the other way, the artist Dashwanth becomes so entranced by Qara Köz, ‘Lady Black Eyes’, that he chooses to disappear into his own paintings of her. ‘A dreamer could become his dream,’ observes the Mughal Emperor.

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