Excessive Candour
Story Loins

The Enchantress of Florence is two Lands of Fable shacked up in a single book: the Mughal Empire during the long high resonating pomp of Akbar the Great (1542-1605) and Florence about a century earlier, around the time Niccolo Machiavelli begins to achieve his own much briefer flight into the airs of history. So there is a lot to accomplish here if we are going to believe a word of any story that claims to weave together these two everywhere-dense continua (a phrase C.H. Waddington used long ago in 1969 to describe our physics-based recognition that the world—that certain times and places in particular, like Renaissance Florence, or the utopian city of Sikri that Akbar built in northern India—is a continuum of "interlocking and mutually interdependent activities" whose joins are deeper than tears). In order to capture two entire everywhere-dense worlds, Salman Rushdie needs therefore to have composed a book which he has woven fast.

That he has not quite done so, that there is a kind of carpal tunnel frailty of grasp in the execution of too many scenes, does in fact moderately impair the telling of his tale, which asserts constantly the everywhere-denseness of his inconnected worlds; and which attempts to seal the linkages and assonances and mirrorings between one and the other Land of Fable through assertions of the reality-shaping potency of art. Machiavelli and his cohort suffer mildly from a slackness of esemplasy (Coleridge's term for the world-shaping muscle of the creative imagination at work); and the genuinely magnificent Akbar seems a bit Autumn of the Patriarch-lite until Rushdie begins to admire him enough to relax into his glory.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez's great novel does of course focus its astonishing tidal waves of language upon the figure of a dictator whose interminable reality-devouring hysterical usurpation of an entire land becomes, by the end of the text, a magic-realist epiphany denser than any life we could imagine living; The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975) is a central 20th-century Song of Horror, a text that all subsequent texts about absolute rulers caught in dreams of omniscience must, because of their lesser density, orbit. And it is true that long passages of The Enchantress of Florence palely shadow the great original; it is, however, also the case that Rushdie does have a different, and entirely serious case to make: that Akbar was in fact both an absolute monarch and a genuine humanitarian sage, almost the first, and perhaps the last.

Into Akbar's empire, late in the 16th century, strides a giant blond swashbuckler from Europe, carrying a letter from Queen Elizabeth which he has purloined from a Scottish lord whose death—partly by something like magic—he has engineered. This man, whose name is Niccolo Vespucci and who is a Florentine, has a reason for bearding the Grand Mughal in the quasi-magical Fatehpur Sikri, a bedizened caravanserai transfigured into a light-shot labyrinthine city of dream: He believes himself to be the son of the youngest sister of Akbar's grandfather Babar, which is to say Akbar's uncle. The two men mirror one another in the flamboyance of their imaginations; both of them are large and tall and blond. But Babar's sister—whose long perilous journey into Florentine exile occupies much of the book—would be well over a century old now; and the spiderweb of Story necessary for any remotely plausible tying of the two worlds together would seem to require a magic weave to gain such a joining.

Painting the portrait of Fable

But The Enchantress of Florence is a fable, and its disparate eras and venues are soon shimmeringly linked (as though Story were a spider that wove the world) by every conceivable engine of magical coherence. The tall tales Vespucci tells themselves shape the world he walks through into a tall tale that others share; Akbar is himself a student of dreams, and has himself dreamt into the world a favourite wife, whose ontological density (and whose sexual allure) intensifies as he nears her rooms; sex itself makes its makers (Rushdie manages to convey a state of tirelessly unending and aspirational arousal that sometimes seems a special gift of the endomorph—one thinks of Clive James, one thinks of Picasso); an artist paints Vespucci's mother at Akbar's command and falls in love with her and disappears himself into the frame of the painting; a songwriter sings of the fire of the passions of intercourse and of the joining of worlds together until he catches fire; dreams walk; a mute whore in Florence speaks only when asked questions that untrigger the narratives which comprise her, for she has been transfigured by magic into a memory palace (echoes of Jack Dann's The Memory Cathedral: A Secret History of Leonardo da Vinci from 1995 may be heard by readers more familiar with the future in general than Rushdie's usual audience).

Moreover, the physical shape of the book itself is designed to convey a sense that what is being told within its pages is real because it is being told. Each chapter is preceded by a page that is blank except for a single line of script, in a large black conspicuous italic setting, which lays down the first five or ten words of the chapter to come, as though it were a prompt for some oral reciter, an incipit, a banner announcing the contents of a scroll. The next page begins the announced chapter with a repetition of the prompt, which are the first words of the opening sentence. It is a simple clever device which "wastes" 20 pages, but I suspect Rushdie's publishers can afford the spend.

The enchantress of Florence is of course Akbar's ancestor, the story of whose life weaves the two venues and the two centuries together. She is real if the book is real. She is unreal if the world to come—which is our world now—is already too much with the figures of the tale. The Enchantress of Florence deposes for the side of the debate that affirms her being, as do the men and women her hegira has fabulized. There is a scent of sex in the scented air.

Leaving the thinning land

But there can be no doubt that the novel is, in the end, a tale of thinning, a tale of the evacuation of Story from the world. What Machiavelli and Akbar share, over and above their witnessing a tale of the old world in its last days, is a habit of mind we of the 21st century must surely treasure, even in retrospect: a humane, rational pluralism about the nature of humanity, of sex, of religion, of politics, of World. The problem with reason and wisdom, however, as Rushdie makes sure we understand, is that reason and wisdom are convertible: that they become, all too easily, tools in the mouths of our masters, who will say anything.

As soon as Vespucci leaves the Land, taking with him an essential pattern of the thread of its story, the sacred lake that feeds Akbar's beloved Fatehpur Sikri drains into the rock; and the city must (as historically did in fact happen) be abandoned. And the novel ends, storyless, where we know it is going to have to end:

And as Akbar rode past the crater where the life-giving lake of Sikri had been he understood the nature of the curse under which he had been placed. It was the future that had been cursed, not the present. In the present he was invincible. He could build ten new Sikris if he pleased. But once he was gone, all he had thought, all he had worked to make, his philosophy and way of being, all that would evaporate like water. The future would not be what he hopwe for, but a dry hostile antagonistic place where people would survive as best they could and hate their neighbors and smash their places of worship and kill one another once again in the renewed heat of the great quarrel he had sought to end for ever, the quarrel over God. In the future it was harshness, not civilization, that would rule.

It was the future that had been cursed.