The Enchantress of Florence By Salman Rushdie, Jonathan Cape, £18.99

The magician, like the trickster, is well advised not to show his hand. Salman Rushdie’s new novel, eight years in the making, disdains this advice with a splendid nonchalance that might well recall a Renaissance grace he omits to mention in this pot-pourri of Mughal and Florentine scents: sprezzatura. Castiglione attributed this grace to his ideal courtier, a figure not unrelated to the Mogor dell’Amore, the Mughal of Love, who in Rushdie’s novel brings news of the New World to the court of the Emperor Akbar. That news, however, reserved for the narrative’s very end, remains uncertain and partial: what occupies the intervening tale is a story of love. It is this that might remind us, not just of the extravagant romances of Boiardo and Ariosto and the tale-telling Scheherezade, as it is meant to do, but also of the trattati d’amore, those Renaissance discourses of love that so often feature a courtier and a ruler, also bound to each other by discursive compulsion.

The Mogor dell’Amore is a trickster by trade, an ignoble and thieving arriviste at Akbar’s court in his newly-built city of Fatehpur Sikri. The description of that city, a city of apparitions and fantasies, is much the best thing in the novel. It places Akbar simultaneously outside the narrative and at its core, as though everything in it were a dream that he is dreaming, like the Red King in Through the Looking Glass. The emperor’s dream comprehends architecture, history, philosophy, kingship, love, and death: passing through it are the successive phenomena of the story, beginning with his imaginary queen Jodhabai. It is not clear whether it is by accident or by design that Rushdie avoids the Rajput wrath recently visited on Jodhaa Akbar. His Jodha, the Jodha of Mughal-e-Azam rather than of any more durable historical source, is projected as the product of fantasy, an ideal but bodiless consort, who is nevertheless supremely skilled in the physical arts of love.

Desire drives this novel — sexual desire above all, but also curiosity and other forms of human appetite. Rushdie, who says somewhere in the novel that the curse of the human race is not that we are so different but that we are so alike, invents a history linked by relentless parallels, familial relations and narrative threads. While the Mogor dell’Amore, later identified as Niccolò Vespucci, attempts like a latter-day Scheherezade to avert death by feeding the Emperor’s appetite for tales, the ever-fleeing Angelica of Ariosto’s great Renaissance romance, the Orlando Furioso, is revealed to be none other than Akbar’s great-aunt and Babar’s sister, the princess Qara Köz. The story of how she reached Italy in the company of a mighty warrior called Argalia, as Boiardo’s Orlando Inamorato reports her to have arrived at Charlemagne’s court in France, is freely elaborated upon by Rushdie, who converts Angelica to a powerful enchantress, mistress of love and time, but prey to fortune. This suits with his incorporation into the narrative of the figure of Niccolò Machiavelli, failed adviser to princes, the greatest of Renaissance students of the ways of fortune.

The narrative is existentially split between two historical figures: the supremely powerful, dream-driven, philosophically curious Jalaluddin Muhammad Akbar in the visionary city of Fatehpur Sikri, and the politically thwarted, realist speculator in human destinies, Niccolò Machiavelli, in the turbulence of quattrocento Florence. More than a generation separates these two. Machiavelli died in 1527, Akbar in 1605. This time-lag has worried many who have tried to institute parallels between the glories of the Mughal court and those of Renaissance Italy. In Rushdie’s novel, the gap occasions a niggling, unsatisfied realist anxiety. Is Akbar in love with his great-aunt? How can the Mogor dell’Amore be Qara Köz’s son? Is the New World the font of eternal youth?

To this last question, Rushdie’s answer seems to be a typically postmodernist yes. But the Old Worlds are doomed: the lake in Fatehpur Sikri dries up and the city is abandoned, Florence turns away its greatest men. Before these eventualities, however, the novel’s time and space are crowded with adventure, with erotic fantasy, with wars, deaths, flights, escapes, tortures, spectacles. Of all Rushdie’s novels, this is the one most tied to history, but tied in the manner of a vast hot-air balloon, straining away from its moorings, heaving and blowing at the end of the thinnest of ropes. The Mogor dell’Amore is a plainly inadequate conduit for so gargantuan a fantasy, though he is appropriately presented as a confidence-trickster, a thief, a spinner of yarns, a time-traveller. But he never seems to be in control of the tale he tells, and he is unable to answer his hearers’ doubts and accusations. The tale spins away, out of control, populated by too many enchantresses, too much magic, too many encounters, intrigues, crises, insurrections. At its core is sex, or sexual desire: but its representation is of a kind to convince us that of all human preoccupations, sex is most purely a fantasy. The sex that drives the novel feeds into Rushdie’s obsession with the shaping of the real by the unreal.

Narrative itself, and its subjection to time’s linear progress, appears to be a problem for Rushdie in this book. Given that Rushdie is himself one of the greatest modern masters of narrative, this is surprising. One notes everywhere his greedy sampling of the greatest exemplars of sustained story-telling, in Arabic, in Persian, in Italian: he even seems to draw upon postmodernist revisitations of the genre, such as Italo Calvino’s reworkings of Ariosto in books like The Castle of Crossed Destinies and The Non-Existent Knight. But despite the persuasive presences of Akbar and Machiavelli, the story as a whole fails to hold our attention. And this failure is not just of the kind experienced by the Mogor dell’Amore, who also sees the Emperor turning away from his tale to his own world of dreams and projects, philosophical speculations and practical solutions. It is a failure that undermines the story-teller’s larger project, and it lies in our inability to yield to the tale and allow it to take hold of us. What Rushdie had done so spectacularly well in Haroun and the Sea of Stories is here done ill: the enchantress fails to enchant, the magician to bind by his spell.

That spell is the spell of words and of stories, as we have always known. Reading is magic, the writer a magician. Machiavelli described this transformation in a letter to Francesco Vettori: “When evening comes, I return home and go to my study. On the threshold I strip naked, taking off my muddy, sweaty workday clothes, and put on the robes of court and palace, and in this graver dress I enter the courts of the ancients and am welcomed by them, and there I taste the food that alone is mine, and for which I was born. And there I make bold to speak to them and ask the motives of their actions, and they, in their humanity reply to me. And for the space of four hours I forget the world, remember no vexation, fear poverty no more, tremble no more at death; I pass indeed into their world.” Repeatedly, Rushdie has transported us to those courts and palaces of art, of the imagination. This book, set so much in actual courts and palaces, makes us long for the workaday clothes of the world we really inhabit.