Reviews
The Enchantress of Florence
Salman Rushdie
Jonathan Cape, 368pp
Salman Rushdie’s tenth novel is another extravagant, mischievous epic that mediates between east and west, this time in a story of bloody sixteenth-century power struggles that travels between Renaissance Italy and the Mughal Empire. The Enchantress of Florence is a daring blend of dense history, magic-tinged fable and twenty-first century allegory. Rushdie’s slippery protagonist, whose host of names include ‘Mogor dell’Amore’ and Niccolò Vespucci, is a charismatic, unreliable and possibly deluded story-teller. The plot, which pivots on the outrageous claims of this charming gatecrasher in the palace of Emperor Akbar, is busy with political machination, philosophical rumination and religious debate. The narrative celebrates the notion that, in its own words, the ‘visionary, revelatory dream-poetry of the quotidian not yet been crushed by blinkered, prosy fact’. You might like to know that it has lots of rude bits too.
Rushdie, who describes himself as ‘a wholly secular person’, may also be the most intensely theological of contemporary British novelists. Unlike some of his literary peers and fellow unbelievers, the author of Midnight’s Children frequently writes about faith with vivid imaginative sympathy rather than contempt. Rushdie is no stranger to what Emperor Akbar, who Rushdie casts in the novel as a secretly sceptical ruler, names ‘the quarrel over God’. Indeed, despite the best efforts of gossip columnists more interested in the details of his private life, it is difficult to write about the novelist without reference to the fatwa that was declared against him on 14 February 1989 by Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran. This spiritually sanctioned death threat, imposed because Rushdie’s fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, was regarded as blasphemous in its representation of the prophet Muhammad, has come to symbolize rivalry between artistic freedom and religious authority in the modern world. High-profile Christian advocates for the novel have been few – indeed, many defenders of free speech are still uncertain how to address the practical issues of religious offence that it provoked – but Rushdie’s concerns demand serious evaluation by all people of faith. In a defence of his novel, entitled ‘Is Nothing Sacred?’, written at the height of the scandal (and delivered as a public lecture by Harold Pinter in 1990), Rushdie coolly observed that ‘whereas religion seeks to privilege one language above all others . . . the novel has always been about the way in which different languages, values and narratives quarrel’.
The Enchantress of Florence, which has Muslim, Hindu, Roman Catholic and Protestant characters, returns to Rushdie’s recurrent theme of religious competition and rivalry. In one brutal episode, a serene rival ruler, ready to be slain by the emperor, makes an unusual proclamation of faith. ‘In Paradise, the words worship and argument mean the same thing . . . In the House of God all voices are free to speak as they choose’. The ‘house of adoration . . . where everything could be said by anyone on any subject, including the non-existence of God and the abolition of kings’ created in the novel by the semi-penitent emperor after this execution of the (entirely fictional) Rana of Cooch Naheen is apparently inspired by a real structure that the historical Akbar had built to house such debate. Yet this ‘place of disputation’ also seems to serve an allegorical function as a celebration of art itself, and specifically, the novel, a form that thrives on lively (rather than malicious or violent) spiritual difference. The novel’s shamelessly erotic dimension – the Emperor making love to an ideal, but entirely imaginary wife, for example – far from being mere titillation is part of a more ambitious exploration of difference, sensuality and the sacred.
If Rushdie has any kind of agenda, it is a commitment to hybridity, difference and pluralism. These ideas are easy to caricature as the daydream of godless liberalism, but who amongst us has been tested, persecuted even, as Rushdie has, for robustly defending our own faith?
Andrew Tate
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