The Enchantress of Florence
Salman Rushdie
Vintage Books. First published 2008
The story goes back and forth between the latter part of Akbar's India (1556-1605 AD) and Florence, Italy, of the Medicis in the early part of the sixteenth century, with side trips to Central Asia. A mixture of fact and fiction, the book traces the story of beautiful Lady Qara Koz (Black Eyes), sister of Babur, the founder of the Mughal empire. After being captured by the Persian Shah Ismail, and serving as his wife/concubine for many years, she changes her allegiance to the Florentine adventurer Argalia, who, as a kind of precursor to Lawrence of Arabia, is serving as a general, the most important one, in the army of the Ottoman Emperor Selim the Gray. In the battle of Chaldiran, the Ottoman army defeated the Persian forces, largely, according to this book, due to the bold leadership of Argalia. After this battle, Argalia retired to Florence, taking Lady Qara Koz with him. She is there involved in the deadly city intrigues, and after a few twists and turns of fortune, when Argalia is killed, she dies too. Her son whose actual birth is a rather a mystery, is adopted by (or is born to) Ago Vespucci, cousin to Amerigo, the eponymous explorer of America. The son is in turn infected with the wandering spirit, and travels to Akbar's India, where he gains the confidence of the emperor and narrates the tale of his ancestry to him. The novel thus keeps cutting between descriptions of the large-hearted and liberal doings of Akbar, and the Qara Koz story. There is some magic, a lot of history - Mughal India at it zenith, the adolescent Ottoman empire, and medieval Italy - and, of course, the fictional story of the Enchantress.
Lovely though the writing is, keeping the reader always interested, never bored, the book is finally a stew of facts, imaginings and fantasies, without any central theme. Except, perhaps, the rather banal one of love, sexual love that is, being more important than anything else, as motivation, and as gratification. There is some slight political commentary, but not deep enough to have any contemporary relevance. Rushdie evokes the times rather well, and his feel for India of half a millennium ago - I don't know about Europe and Central Asia - is authentic. The story is complicated, like most of his novels, and invokes ideas, tropes and the historical zeitgeist from all over the world in the times he writes about. In places the detail is stunning, like a Mughal miniature - perhaps deliberately so. In fact he describes a Mughal artist and his paintings, some of them imaginary in fact but faithful to the style. And the style then carries over to Rushdie's writing. Sometimes, however, the detail is so much, and so irrelevant to the main story line, that these parts of the novel reminded me of the work of Irving Wallace, who would research a topic and then spend half the book dumping his recently acquired knowledge on a disinterested reader. (Though, of course, Wallace didn't write a tenth as well as Rushdie.)
A good book, and, like 'Shalimar the Clown', surprisingly (to me) readable.
Lovely though the writing is, keeping the reader always interested, never bored, the book is finally a stew of facts, imaginings and fantasies, without any central theme. Except, perhaps, the rather banal one of love, sexual love that is, being more important than anything else, as motivation, and as gratification. There is some slight political commentary, but not deep enough to have any contemporary relevance. Rushdie evokes the times rather well, and his feel for India of half a millennium ago - I don't know about Europe and Central Asia - is authentic. The story is complicated, like most of his novels, and invokes ideas, tropes and the historical zeitgeist from all over the world in the times he writes about. In places the detail is stunning, like a Mughal miniature - perhaps deliberately so. In fact he describes a Mughal artist and his paintings, some of them imaginary in fact but faithful to the style. And the style then carries over to Rushdie's writing. Sometimes, however, the detail is so much, and so irrelevant to the main story line, that these parts of the novel reminded me of the work of Irving Wallace, who would research a topic and then spend half the book dumping his recently acquired knowledge on a disinterested reader. (Though, of course, Wallace didn't write a tenth as well as Rushdie.)
A good book, and, like 'Shalimar the Clown', surprisingly (to me) readable.
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