The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie

According to Rushdie this is his “most researched book” which required “Years and years of reading“.

It is about the visit of a European to the Mughal emperor Akbar’s court and his claim that he is a long lost relative of Akbar, born of an exiled Indian princess and an Italian from Florence. The story moves between continents, the court of Akbar to Renaissance Florence mixing history, fantasy and fable.

The stranger begins to tell Akbar the tale, going back to the boyhood of three friends in Florence, Il Machia, Ago Vespucci and Nino Argalia, the last of whom became an adventurer in the Orient.

This brilliant, fascinating, generous novel swarms with gorgeous young women both historical and imagined, beautiful queens and irresistible enchantresses, along with some whores and a few quarrelsome old wives – all stock figures, females perceived solely in relation to the male. Women are never treated unkindly by the author, but they have no autonomous being. The Enchantress herself, who turns everyone into puppets of her will, has no personality at all, and exists – literally – by pleasing men. Akbar calls her a “woman who had forged her own life, beyond convention, by the force of her will alone, a woman like a king“. But in fact she does nothing but sell herself to the highest bidder, and her power is an illusion permitted by him.

Rushdie’s Akbar is imperial, intelligent and very likable, a marvellous spokesman for his author. Akbar tried to unite all India, “all races, tribes, clans, faiths, and nations” – a powerful dream indeed, though doomed to perish with him.Akbar is the moral centre of the book, its centre of gravity, and provides its strongest link to the issues that have concerned Rushdie in his works and his life. It all comes down to the question of responsibility. Akbar’s objection to God is “that his existence deprived human beings of the right to form ethical structures by themselves“.

Tt is the hand of the master artist, past all explanation, that gives this book its glamour and power, its humour and shock, its verve, its glory. It is a wonderful tale, full of follies and enchantments. East meets west with a clash of cymbals and a burst of fireworks.