Salman Rushdie
Tales of a fabulist traveller
Salman Rushdie's The Enchantress of Florence finds him on familiar, East-meets-West ground, as a Florentine refugee turns up at the Mughal court, says Tim Adams
The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie
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 did not want hordes', 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 Köz, 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 Köz 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. 'We are their dream,' she tells the emperor, 'and they are ours.' Rushdie's men are always dreamers, though, and the stories they tell themselves are generally more real than the fantastical bricks and mortar around them.
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 of The Enchantress of Florence 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 Arabian nights have long since been fair game, but he also steals gleefully from Orlando Furioso and from Machiavelli. 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, in a wry statement of intent.
Namechecked in these notes is the writer that Rushdie has most often claimed as a touchstone, Italo Calvino. In his recent collection of essays, Step Across This Line, Rushdie noted that he wanted his later writing to aspire to Calvino's stated virtues of 'lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility and multiplicity'. He suggested that he was searching for something like the Italian's tone of voice, which 'used the language of fable while eschewing the easy moral purpose of, for example, Aesop'. Calvino might be mentioned in the compendious endnotes, but oddly not for the book this one most resembles, Invisible Cities, which played out exactly Rushdie's storytelling scenario, though between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan.
The comparison is in many ways telling, not least because it is hard to imagine two more variant interpretations of the ideas of 'lightness, quickness and exactitude'. Calvino prized concision; Rushdie brings to his cross-cultural exchange his expected garrulous hyperbole. The seduction of Calvino's book lies in the contrast between the modesty and minimalism of his structure and the ornate imagination it contains; all of his ironies arise from that tension. Rushdie forgoes such possibilities by creating a structure often every bit as grandiose and bewildering as the palaces and harems it describes.
He has a gift for evoking opulence. In Akbar's palace, where 'only noises of delight were permitted to be heard', stonemasons lay down their tools when the emperor is in residence, giving him the impression that the capital is being built in silence. Sikri is an expression of his will and desire and in describing it, Rushdie's prose is never less than a match for the Mughal's sense of his omnipotent self: 'Silently, slowly, like mind-creatures in a dream, the concubines circled and swayed. They stirred the air around the emperor into a magic soup flavoured with the spices of arousal' and so on.
By contrast with Calvino, Rushdie's rhetoric can, as a result, sometimes seem all pomp and circumstance. In this fictional world, no one is drawn at human scale and no drama resists melodrama. The emperor has all sorts of factotums; 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'. Of all the jobs in history, it is the one you feel Rushdie could easily have made his own.
In among this languid glitter, the book does not develop arguments as such; characters are rather occasionally prone to a rush of epigram and aphorism. The whole, though, is the latest installment in Rushdie's lifelong manifesto for the transformative power of narrative, for the storyteller as the conductor of all the world's chaos. (In this sense, once again, Rushdie emerges as the hero of his own fiction, the man who can shape and shift like no other.)
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.
Sunday April 20, 2008
The Observer You can read an
interview and an exclusive excerpt featured ( page 73-80) in
India Today 
