AKBAR IN WONDERLAND

His tenth novel, The Enchantress of Florence, is no different, despite the fact that he forays into an all-new territory and period. At the centre of the novel is the tautologically titled Akbar the Great, the Mughal emperor who seeks not only power, but also glory; groping for his own definition of humanism and “worship as argument” at a time when the Spanish Inquisition is on in full swing in Europe. “In the Tent of the New Worship the Winemen and the Waterers were calling one another heretics and fools. The emperor wanted to confess his secret disappointment in all mystics and philosophers. He wanted to sweep the whole argument aside, to erase the centuries of inheritance and reflection, and allow man to stand naked as a baby upon the throne of heaven.” Rushdie’s Akbar is a fantasist, drifting away on lonely dreams even as he wages bloody wars and subdues kingdoms. He mulls his own singularity, and the plurality of all identities, on argument and worship, on love. He falls in love often and intensely, but his heart belongs to his phantom consort, Jodha. Everyone else at the court conspires in this great feat of projection, and even as the emperor knows he’s invented her, he loves her for his very frailty in the face of her.

And into this world comes an intriguing stranger, a young man who calls himself Mogor dell’Amore, claiming relation to Akbar himself through Qara Koz urf Angelica, a lost Mughal princess whose absurd beauty has been the undoing of many men from the Shah of Persia to the mighty Florentine mercenary Nino Argalia. Mogor tells the emperor his crazy yarn (and Rushdie can’t resist “the audience is king”), which is also a meditation on power and performance, statecraft and stagecraft.

One of the purely delightful bits in the novel is the series of mangled communiqués between Elizabeth I (Gloriana, the virgin queen) and Jalaluddin Akbar — Queen Zelabat Giloriana to him and Zelabdim Echebar to her — that results in Akbar being abruptly infatuated with his female mirror image, and just as swiftly disenchanted with her. It doesn’t strictly do anything for the plot, but there’s an abundance, a gusto, a temerity in the writing that reminds you of all the reasons you keep going back to Rushdie. There’s an improvised song, “My Sweet Polenta” (If she was a florin I would have spent her, if she was a book I would have lent her… if she was a message I would have sent her, if she was a meaning I would have meant her) for which he shares credit with Ian McEwan of all people.

The story careens between Mughal India and Florence under the Medicis, the Ottoman and Persian armies, and there is even Amerigo Vespucci’s newfound land, America. From a horny teenage Machiavelli hunting for mandrake roots to get laid, to potato witches, Vlad the Impaler, a bunch of giants called Otho, Botho, Clotho and D’Artagnan, pirate ships and bordellos, an enchantress and her “mirror” slave-girl who becomes a real-life memory palace (an allusion to Simonedes’ lost art of fabulous recall), a couple of whores named Skeleton and Mattress and all kinds of elaborate sex and violence — the novel is just plain loco in its loquacity.

But for all this almost pathological spinning of stories and the great spray of exotic detail, it leaves no impress upon the mind. Much of it rests on how much you buy into the awesome sorcery cast by Angelica, whose existence is measured solely by her effect on others. Argalia, Jodha, Mogor, all the others characters are ciphers, pretty much. Only one character casts a shadow, and that’s the seeking, generous, all-too-human Akbar: “the Grand Mughal, the dusty, battle-weary, victorious, pensive, incipiently overweight, disenchanted, mustachioed, poetic, over-sexed, and absolute emperor, who seemed altogether too magnificent, too world-encompassing, and in sum, too much to be a single human personage”. This novel is in sum, too much to be a single novel too, but if you’re a Rushdie-tolerant type, it doesn’t matter — because as Akbar muses, “language upon a silver tongue affords enchantment enough”. And that’s almost reason enough to read The Enchantress of Florence.