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.
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.
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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