The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie
Previous Winner Rushdie Makes Booker Longlist
Sep 2, 2008
Mughal emperor Akbar is a powerful man. He is the “Sublime Radiance, Star of India and Sun of Glory” (his own words), the “Enchanter”, a “bewitcher of the real”. His palaces are lavish, filled with the greatest wits and the most beautiful women in the land, waiting to humour his every whim. A tower studded with elephant tusks marks the way to the palace gate: “all elephants belonged to the emperor, and by spiking a tower with their teeth he was demonstrating his power. Beware! the tower said.”
The Mughal of Love
Yet a mysterious and potentially dangerous stranger manages to charm his way into the palace and reach the ear of the king, calling himself “Mogor dell’ Amore” – the Mughal of Love. The reader has already seen this beautiful, golden-haired stranger lie, steal and murder, but the king agrees to listen to the story this newcomer has travelled half the world in order to share.
The Lost Princess
Thus begins a story within a story. The blonde stranger claims that he is Akbar’s uncle, his mother having been the youngest sister of Akbar’s grandfather Babar. This beautiful girl, named Qara Koz, or “Black Eyes”, “on account of the extraordinary power of those orbs to bewitch all upon whom they gazed”, is unknown to Akbar, a “lost princess” believed to possess extraordinary powers of sorcery – the enchantress of the title. The stranger’s life depends upon Akbar and his court believing the tale that he tells: but is he really telling the truth?
Like many of Rushdie’s previous novels, The Enchantress of Florence blends realism with fantasy. Akbar’s favourite wife, Jodha, is openly acknowledged by all to be imaginary, a product of the emperor’s mind, and yet appears in the novel as a fully fledged character. A brilliant artist vanishes, and is later found tohave disappeared within one of his own paintings. Even the city of Sikri, home to Akbar and his court, lacks solidity, “shimmering in the heat like an opium vision”, with its palaces which “looked as if they were made of red smoke”.
Truth or Fiction?
The characters are equally beguiling, not least the emperor himself, a “battle-weary, victorious, pensive, incipiently overweight, disenchanted, moustachioed, poetic, over-sexed, and absolute emperor”. Why does such a powerful man fall so readily under the spell of a man who can dream in seven different languages?
This is a rich and rewarding book, full of fantastic fables combined with comic interludes – look out for the trial by mad elephant. At the end of it all, the reader may well conclude that “Sikri would always look like a mirage… weakening the border between sanity and delirium, between what was fanciful and what was real”.
The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie is published in the UK by Jonathan Cape (2008), 349 pages, ISBN 978-0-224-06163-6.
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