Newndpress, Saturday May 3 2008 18:16 IST

A new Salman Rushdie novel is always a big event, filled with the anticipation and the expectation of the momentous. It seems that Rushdie knows this — or maybe the disappointment of the last three novels has forced him to face this reality. So what does he do? He weaves the magic of storytelling, the expectation of the listener, and the hopelessness of the artiste all into his tenth novel, and let it be declared at the outset: it is an enchantment.

In the way that once you enter a hall of mirrors, you see a multiplicity of reflections, so can you see a multiplicity of alter egos that are the loci of The Enchantress of Florence. You see Rushdie as a prestidigitator, a nimble-fingered writer able to produce dizzying tricks with the stroke of his pen/keyboard, much like Mogor dell’Amore, a yellow-haired, lozenge-coated foreigner who turns up at Emperor Akbar’s court, with a story to tell, and whose own identity is the final twist of his story-within-a-story.

You see Rushdie as Akbar’s grand-aunt, Qara Köz, the “lost” sister of the first Mughal dynast, Babur, the eponym of the novel’s title, known sometimes as Lady Black Eyes. She is the enchantress/bewitcher under whose spell people fall immediately. Good fortune is ascribed to her benevolence, and even Pope Leo X (who was from the Florentine republic) wonders if she is a saint. It is deep into the story that her enchantment begin to weaken — because she has had to hold too many people in her spell — and isn’t that exactly Rushdie’s problem?

You also see Rushdie in Akbar, the Emperor of Emperors, a man who has conquered the physical universe and has set about, with his nine jewels (Birbal, et al), to conquer abstractions, first by creating an imaginary queen vastly superior to the rest of his queens, named Jodha (how different this is in tone from the recent film), then by allowing a foreigner to weave a story that may or may not be true of a Grand-aunt who may have been vastly more bewitching than Jodha. Who cares if her story is fiction; she is the ultimate sex/death fusion that Akbar seeks.

You also see Rushdie as the court artist Dashwanth, originally as an urchin given to night-time lampoons of the court grandees (which is perhaps how Rushdie sees his own beginnings) who then becomes the melancholy chronicler of Qara Köz’s story through paintings into which he disappears, hidden in the margins of his work, as the prestidigitator is destined to be by the end of the novel, and as Rushdie sees as his own future.

As you can by now see, the characters are sharply etched, there is a mystery in the story, and it is travels grandly in a sort of counter-silk road picaresque adventure: an Uzbek warlord named Shaibani Khan captures Babur’s two sisters; he is defeated in battle by the Safavid Shah Ismail who returns the elder sister to Babur. The younger one, the Enchantress, stays behind — with a maid who is her “mirror” — and this is the downfall of the Prince of Persia. He is eventually defeated by Argalia — a Janissary chief originally from Florence, who now works for the Ottoman Calipahte, but who will in time flee home with the Enchantress, and from where she will eventually escape to the New World (Akbar is enraged to hear it called India by Columbus).

There are mirrors and echoes strewn about the book; characters reflect each other through personal histories, through habits, through desires, through dreams, and even through escapes from death (Tansen is rescued from a severe injury by two sisters who mirror the Enchantress and her maid). And looking into a mirror is not necessarily serendipitous: “The curse of the human race is not that we are so different from one another, but that we are so alike”, Akbar says.

Even the eyes of Lady Black Eyes mirror the cosmic black holes that the enchantment of art can become. Rushdie’s biggest terror is art itself: “She would entice him into the delirium of an impossible love and he would sink into her and away from the world of law and action and majesty and destiny”, Akbar thinks about his Grand-aunt — but he could be thinking about the nature of art itself.

The Enchantress of Florence is engrossing, entertaining and enchanting. Of course it isn’t Rushdie’s best, but even a casual wave of his magic wand produces awe; even his ordinary is superior to the best efforts of most other conjurers. It is simply, marvelous.