KEY POINTS:
No novelist understands the possibilities and perils of globalisation more acutely than Salman Rushdie. At its best, his fiction has always denied any fixed geographical vantage; there is no "them and us" to it.
The ongoing discourse between East and West has been his biography, his obsession (and for a decade his death sentence). In this, his 10th novel, he goes back to the first distant inklings of the cultural exchange that formed him.
It is Rushdie's contention that there was, by the end of the 16th century, not one Renaissance but two. Florentine society had its mirror on the subcontinent in the court of the Mughal emperor Akbar in his glorious palace complex at Fatehpur Sikri.
Akbar, as depicted here, is a made-to-measure Rushdie hero, a one-man land of contrasts. He is "a Muslim vegetarian, a warrior who wanted only peace, a philosopher-king: a contradiction in terms".
Akbar, crucially, has claims to being the first great Indian secularist. "If there had never been a God, the emperor thought, it might have been easier to work out what goodness was."
By the time the novel opens, Akbar is a marauder who no longer wants to maraud; he dreams of a culture of dissent. "In paradise," he suggests, speaking unadulterated Rushdie, "the words worship and argument mean the same thing." Argument duly arrives at Akbar's court - in Rushdie's telling - in the person of an unlikely yellow-haired chancer, Niccolo Vespucci, a refugee from that other Renaissance, and the self-styled "Mogor dell'Amore", the Mughal of Love.
The traveller is another Rushdie archetype - a man who can dream in seven languages, who wears an inevitable coat of many colours and who trades in fictions, chief among which are these: he claims to be an ambassador of the Queen of England and, even more implausibly, to be the Mughal's long-lost uncle.
All he has to back up these claims are stories, and these stories are the essence of Rushdie's wild and whirling novel. Vespucci claims to be the son of the legendary Qara Koz, the "Lady Black Eyes", a descendant of Genghis Khan and the Mughal's great-aunt.
Qara, the Carla Bruni of her day, was first captured by an Uzbek warlord and then, through dazzling beauty and an apparent gift for sorcery, traded herself up among the world's most powerful men, eventually ending up with the commander of the Sultan's armies, Argalia, Vespucci's father.
As he unfolds this tale, which grows ever more fantastical and involves all manner of digression, the emperor is willingly bewitched. Qara Koz becomes the tangible bridge between the two cultures, while remaining a distant fantasy.
Akbar is grounded in the world by another imaginary queen, Jodha, the perfect wife of his daydreams. Jodha sees no sense in travellers from England and Italy - they seem too exotic to be trusted. The apparently entwined history of the two men also allows Rushdie to indulge his primary literary compulsion - to find new ways for old worlds to collide.
The overriding argument is partly that Western civilisation, to borrow from Gandhi, would be a good idea. Superstition and despotism are not the preserve of the mystical East here, nor are enlightenment and humanism inventions of the classical West. Each civilisation has its fair share of beauty and folly, cruelty and benevolence.
"This may be the curse of the human race," the traveller suggests at one point, "not that we are so different from one another, but that we are so alike." In setting this out, Rushdie the jackdaw is much in evidence too: he borrows and moulds all sorts of familiar tales into this one.
The novel offers something of a paper trail of such references in a long bibliography, mostly of scholarly histories: "A few liberties have been taken with the historical record in the interests of truth," Rushdie notes. His rhetoric can sometimes seem all pomp and circumstance. In this fictional world, no one is drawn at human scale and no drama resists melodrama.
The emperor 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". Of all the jobs in history, it is the one you feel Rushdie could easily have made his own.
He has always created the sense of the novelist as plate-spinner: keeping an unlikely number of tales in the air, darting among them to give each one further momentum just as it starts to wobble.
The Enchantress of Florence is a virtuoso demonstration of this energetic art; among other things, it challenges you to pay attention, half-believing it could all fall around his ears at any moment, marvelling that it never quite does.
- OBSERVER
