Novels are often imbued with dramatic tension to drive along the narrative, but it is rare to chance upon a novel where the tension resides not in the plot, but rather in the ideas and themes which drive the narrative, and upon which the story is predicated.
“The Enchantress of Florence has been earmarked as a return to form for one of the most celebrated and controversial writers of modern times, Indian-born Salman Rushdie, whose very name elicits strong, often negative, reaction this side of the Mediterranean.
It’s neigh on impossible to talk about Rushdie in these parts without addressing the elephant in the room. In these shores, he is not known for “Midnight’s Children, which was chosen as the Booker of Bookers, or for blazing the trail of post-colonial literature – written in English by multicultural authors and paving the way for a new generation including the likes of Zadie Smith and Monica Ali. Around here, he is known for one thing and one thing only: “The Satanic Verses.
In fact, one would venture with some measure of confidence that he is known for little else besides the book which caused such outrage in the Muslim world in the late 1980s, prompted a death fatwa from the Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini and spent the better part of the 1990s incognito.
One could also say that those who wanted to take his life had not actually read the novel, and thus did not realize that the central premise of the story and in fact the majority of the narrative had nothing to do with the story of the “Satanic Verses.
Yet the land of magical realism which Rushdie inhabits has always been heavily rooted in historical events, “Midnight’s Children chiming with the birth of Indian independence and his following novel “Shame tackling events in neighboring Pakistan.
While he doesn’t hit the heights as effortlessly or as often enough as Marquez, he is still one of the best storytellers around, effervescent in his loquaciousness and adept in his ability to be weighty yet whimsical.
And Rushdie doesn’t hold back for “Florence, his latest Booker Prize short-listed novel, piling theme upon theme, pulling out all the stops, which is seemingly the novel’s inherent flaw. A sense of restraint would have done wonders, but the book’s searing pace possibly lent to this, and clashed with the frequent meanderings injected intermittently throughout the novel.
Exoticism between East and WestSet in the 16th century and spanning two civilizations, one denoting West, the other East, “Florence is the tale of a charming ruffian, the blond Florentine Niccolo Vespucci, the self-proclaimed Mughal of Love. He travels to the court of the Mughal Emperor Akbar the Great in India to regale him with a fantastical tale which purportedly binds the two together. Akbar is Rushdie’s main voice, but Vespucci is also a partial reflection of the author.
The story is littered with historical characters, including Akbar himself and Niccolo Machiavelli, the Florentine political realist painted here as an embittered former civil servant angry at a populace that turned its back on him as he rotted in a prison cell.
There are also characters created by characters, literally willed into being by desires, by imaginations so strong that those that did not at first exist did eventually exist, and were seen by others.
The author paints two cities in flux, a Florence that oscillates wildly between hedonism and puritanical religious intolerance and Akbar’s capital Fatehpur Sikri, a majestic city of opulence and regality built on the backs of the poor, and as transient as its peasants’ livelihood.
At the heart of the story is the enchantress herself, Qara Koz, the Indian princess who traveled all cross the world as she beguiled a series of powerful and brutal, bloodthirsty men. Again Rushdie weaves a fascinating contradiction with the character of the enchantress, who is at the mercy of man in a man’s world, existing solely for their pleasure, yet flits between them as her survival necessitates, leaving them lovelorn and devoid of life, in the metaphorical sense and often in the literal sense too.
Qara Koz is also the spirit of the East, the stranger that immigrates to the West, fascinates them, but is eventually, inevitably, rejected by them. Vespucci fulfils a similar role, the Tabula rasa upon which the East’s exoticism is contrasted while simultaneously being the harbinger of the West’s extreme exoticism to the East.
In part, “Florence is a study of cultures, how they unwittingly share their foibles, their peccadilloes and yet persist in treating and perceiving the other as different. To each other they are exotic, surreal places where normality marches to a different beat yet they are bound by the same motivations, the same impetus.
Rushdie also questions the impact one has on the other, writing, “Was foreignness itself a thing to be embraced as a revitalizing force bestowing bounty and success upon its adherents, or did it adulterate something essential in the individual and the society as a whole. Did it initiate a process of decay which would end in an alienated, inauthentic death?
Debating faithIf there is a unifying thread between his latest novel and a disproportionate theme in “The Satanic Verses it is that of religion. Since his ordeal, Rushdie has understandably been an outspoken critic of religious fundamentalism and religion itself.
In “Florence, Rushdie – speaking through Akbar – muses heavily on the role of religion and its effect on mankind’s spiritual and moral progression.
Unlike “Verses, religion is a recurrent and blatant motif in “Florence, so much so that it is practically Rushdie speaking through Akbar as the almost divine emperor embarks on a journey of self-discovery plagued with doubt.
“For was it not a kind of infantilization of the self to give up one’s power of agency and believe that such power resided outside oneself rather than one within? This was also his objection to God, that his existence deprived human beings of the rights to form ethical structures by themselves. But magic was all around and would not be denied, and it would be a rash ruler who pooh-poohed it. Religion could be rethought, re-examined, remade, perhaps even discarded; magic was impervious to such assaults.
Akbar was “a Muslim vegetarian, a warrior who wanted only peace, a philosopher-king: a contradiction in terms. He believes that “in paradise, the words worship and argument mean the same thing.
The real Akbar did tackle the subject of religion, introducing a series of debates between Muslim scholars and people of other faiths. Rushdie here is defending people’s right to dream, removed from the limitations imposed by religion’s fundamentalists, sometimes making the distinction between religion and the fundamentalists that it may produce. Speaking of Islamic fundamentalists in “Step Across This Line he says “These are tyrants, not Muslims.
This distinction doesn’t exist in “Florence, at one point Akbar thinks to himself “If there had never been a God . it might have been easier to work out what goodness was.
And as Akbar continues to postulate on this idea, he realizes that even he, with his power, wealth and influence, cannot impose a resolution on the matter.
“The future would not be what he hoped for, but a dry hostile antagonistic place where people would survive as best they could and hate their neighbors and smash their places of worship and kill one another once again in the renewed heat of the great quarrel he had sought to end forever, the quarrel over God.
Here we have a master of the fable repeatedly pointing out the absurdity of such lore and how people lasciviously gobble it up with wanton abandon, like Akbar’s devout subjects believing the mythical tales that envelop their ruler. And is not religion steeped in fable? It’s a concoction of myth and belief which fuels a tension of the underlying ideas that propel the narrative, for where is the tipping point when fable actually becomes belief?
Rushdie is prone to bombast, an evident reflection of the depths
of his feelings on the subject, and the book can as much dazzle as leave you cold. Equal parts magical and infuriating, “The Enchantress of Florence is the best and worst of Rushdie, self-indulgent but reveling in and championing this self-indulgence. In a way it is the author tracking out his life on the landscape he knows best, the novel.
