The stories within a story

Twists half the fun in Rushdie's spectacular new novel

By Duane Davis, Special to the Rocky

Published June 18, 2008 at 5:25 p.m.
Updated June 19, 2008 at 1:20 p.m.

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A spectacularly entertaining read, Salman Rushdie's new novel, The Enchantress of Florence, is a wildly inventive fantasia. It attempts to stuff the real and the imagined, the historical and the fanciful, the possible and the impossible into a wobbly, preposterous plot that ricochets between Florence at the height of the Italian Renaissance and the Mughal Empire of India under the rule of Akbar The Great during the same time frame.

There are a number of actual historical persons here, from the aforementioned Akbar to Niccolo Machiavelli and Amerigo Vespucci (after whom the Americas are named), to the pirate Andrea Doria and the Hungarian ruler, Vlad The Impaler (the model for Bram Stoker's Dracula), to mention just a handful.

Readers familiar with Rushdie's ways with fiction, however, will not expect him to stick to the facts, ma'am, just the facts - this despite the presence of a bibliography of references at the book's end running to 80 entries and seven recommended Web sites!

The novel begins, as so many do, with a man who has a terrible need to tell a story, but who must find his proper audience. In this case, the man, to give him just one of the three names he is known by in the book, is Mogor dell'Amore, a blonde Italian traveling under mysterious circumstances. He's going from Florence to Sikri, capital of the vast Indian Mughal Empire ruled by Akbar The Great - who is, in fact, the very audience Mogor is seeking to tell his tale to.

Though finding Akbar takes relatively few pages, the route is difficult and takes a number of surprising twists and turns. Finally, Mogor stands before Akbar pretending to be an emissary from Queen Elizabeth of England and bearing a letter from her in her own handwriting (remember, I warned you about the twists and turns).

If you stop too long to puzzle over the tangle of events, you'll miss one of the book's major points - it is only the next story that will explain the story just told. But that one then, too, will require another story. . .

And so the next story in this maze shifts from Mogor to Akbar, a ruler of absolute power and authority, a man deeply involved in the mesh of politics and culture of his empire who would seem to have very little need or desire or even time for fanciful thought. In Rushdie's telling, Akbar becomes the real center of the book, its most interesting character and - watch for the twist - one of the most driven to tell a story of startling inventiveness and obsession.

For it turns out, that though he has many wives to serve his needs, Akbar has invented an imaginary wife: "Even the emperor succumbed to fantasy," explains Rushdie's narrator. "Queens floated within his palaces like ghosts . . . One of these royal personages did not really exist. She was an imaginary wife . . . He gave her a name, Jodha, and no man dared gainsay him."

The rest of the wives, of the flesh and blood variety, become quite jealous of the phantom wife: "How could the mighty emperor prefer the company of a woman who did not exist? When he was gone, at least, she ought to absent herself as well . . . She should disappear like the apparition she was . . . That she did not, the living queens concluded, was the sort of solecism one had to expect from an imaginary being."

The risk here, of course, is that too much of this becomes cute, cloying, precious. I'm happy to report that, by and large, Rushdie avoids these pitfalls, generally by two means: his extraordinary sympathy for his characters (particularly Akbar) and his nimble handling of his storytelling tasks.

Here, the reader is in the hands of a writer far more than merely competent. Though the plot jumps with the unpredictable splatter of a globe of mercury shattering on a marble floor, the beauty is in the motion and the scatter, in the spinning stars of light and liquid that flash through the pages.

Oh, the plot moves forward - sort of. After many twists and turns, Mogor gets to tell his story to Akbar, who no more believes it than you will. A little later in the book, Rushdie writes, "The story was untrue, but the untruth of untrue stories could sometimes be of service in the real world."

But before we can spend much time worrying about this, we are whisked away to Florence. And, eventually, we are even introduced to the Enchantress of Florence, a dark, seductive Asian beauty (who Mogor, the blonde Italian, claims is his mother and Akbar's great aunt - something only possible if one accepts Rushdie's notion of "the variability of chronological conditions" in the story).

This serves to introduce more stories that create yet more puzzles. By then, it is hoped, the reader will have lost interest in the "plot," having fallen in love with a phantom plot, a magic of mystery, a tissue of lies, a -in Rushdie's words - "languid delirium" that spins on and on, telling a story whose true meaning has something to do with the romance and risk of simply being alive and of trying to explain to others to yourself, what that is like.

I can't imagine a better book to stick in your beach bag this summer.

Duane Davis is a freelance writer living in Littleton.

In person

Salman Rushdie will speak and read from his work at the Aspen Summer Words Literary Festival, Sunday at Paepcke Auditorium, 1000 N. Third St. on the Aspen Institute Campus.

* Cost: $30. Limited seating available.

* Information: 1-970-925-3122, ext. 1#

The Enchantress of Florence

* By Salman Rushdie. Random House, 357 pages, $27. $24.

* Grade: A

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