It begins with literal brilliance as a handsome Western traveller, calling himself “Mogor dell’Amore” (the Mughal of Love), arrives at Emperor Akbar’s newly built court in Fatehpur Sikri, where the lake looks like “a sea of molten gold.” The stranger, whose long yellow hair flows down his face like the golden lake, rides a bullock-cart like a god, but he is really a man with a secret meant only for the emperor’s ears.
Officially on business for Queen Elizabeth I, he claims to be the child of a lost Mughal princess, the youngest sister of Akbar’s grandfather Babar. His story is meant to be her story, in fact, the story of Qara Koz, “Lady Black Eyes,” a great beauty and a sorceress, who was taken captive by an Uzbed warlord, next by the Shah of Persia, and then became the lover of a Florentine soldier of fortune. The stranger calls himself Ucello because it is a word for “bird” and a euphemism for the male organ.
Rushdie’s fascination with history, legend and epic come to the fore early, as he makes sketches of this traveller and of Akbar’s court. Ucello, a lover of Petrarch’s poetry, can dream in seven languages. “He picked up languages the way most soldiers picked up diseases,” Rushdie writes, “his languages were his gonorrhea, his syphilis, his scurvy, his ague, his plague” - ensuring that we get the point. But the magic of the Mughal court offsets these unpleasant associations, for the court looks like a mirage, “an opium vision” in which queens float in the palaces like ghosts, and where there is a pronounced “sensuous hush.”
“Only noises of delight were permitted to be heard,” Rushdie writes. “The bells on the ankles of dancers echoed sweetly, and fountains tinkled. … There was whispered poetry in the emperor’s ear, and in the pachisi courtyard on Thursdays there was much languid play.”
If this suggests an Arabian Night’s entertainment (though Akbar has recently killed the Rana of Cooch Naheen for having a bigger moustache than his), that is Rushdie’s intent, which he underscores in this sentence about a prostitute: “When it became plain after the notorious night of one hundred and one copulations that Mohini the Skeleton’s tolerance for sex was infinite and that the prince was incapable of breaking her as he had almost broken his mistress, the slave girl’s fate was sealed.”
But Rushdie never wants to stay his ornamental literary hand or his gamesmanship. His early summary of Akbar sounds like a send-up (though the emperor becomes the tale’s moral centre and is ultimately given a rounded, most interesting portrait), and there are bombastic passages that satirize devotees of the old-school style of ornate prose.
Rushdie indulges a garrulity that damages his book. No torture is too fiendish to be described, no stereotype too awful to sidestep. So there are references to agonizing hangings, death by suffocation, pirates, whores, quarrelsome old wives, fierce warriors and disaffected princes.
The Eastern quality of the first half of the novel is contrasted with the Western quality of the second (with several strong echoes from Ariosto), the first formalized in a series of audiences between Akbar and the traveller, and the second given narratives by the brother of Amerigo Vespucci. There is enchantment in the first part, where Akbar conjures up his perfect queen, Jodha, where Qara Koz controls events with her mind and where Ucello’s silver tongue expresses the magic of language. Rushdie revels in Akbar’s explicit celebration of ethical and aesthetic forms made by men, independent of divine decree.
There is enchantment in the second part, too, as three boyhood friends (Niccolo Machiavelli, Amerigo Vespucci and Antonino Argalia) show their desperation for women and power. Florence itself is an enchantress: “When it kisses you, you are lost, whether you be commoner of king.” However, the quality of enchantment is never sustained for long, as Rushdie indulges his penchant for superficial characterization, melodramatic clichés, cheap sentimentality and second-rate prose.
Rushdie allows his historical research to show (he appends a six-page bibliography) as he romps through political, religious, cultural and even sexual fortunes of Renaissance Florence, dropping historical names (Akbar, Vlad the Impaler, Machiavelli, Savonarola) without more than the briefest sketches of them, and often causing his story to get sidetracked by subsidiary characters and events.
At the end, Akbar is driven from his magic city when the lake runs dry, and he realizes that the future will be a dark place where people will hate and kill in a quarrel over God. This perspective has certainly proved justified in time - remember the fatwa against Rushdie - but it hardly rectifies the flaws in this disappointing novel. If there is an overarching theme, it is surely the intersection of the imaginary with the real, but, although the novel invites us to speculate on the power of language and imagination to conjure up ideal beauty, and thereby show the fulfilment of human potential, it blurs its principal theme by its undisciplined form.
The Enchantress of Florence is many things: a historical romp, a weaving of magic realism, a pure fairy tale, a love story, a postmodern exercise of ideas about identity and storytelling, a thriller, a political satire and a case of legend-making. However, clever though it is, and shot through with some dazzling passages, it is below the high standards we aptly apply to Rushdie.
emperor akbar,fatehpur sikri,gonorrhea,love story,mughal court,Novel,prose,seven languages,western traveller,yellow hair
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