Stephen Laniel’s Unspecified Bunker

Rushdie has often been torn between two opposing interests. On the one hand, he often has a moral that he wants to impart. Midnight's Children was about the dissolution and insanity of India; Shalimar the Clown was an overwrought, heartbroken thing about Kashmir; The Moor's Last Sigh was an impassioned story of a writer on the run from a death sentence — an obvious allusion to the price that the government of Iran had put on his head. (That death sentence was, itself, in retaliation for The Satanic Verses, which is Rushdie’s worst novel. If you’re going to be sentenced to death, I say, be sentenced to death for a great work of art.) On the other side, he wants to just tell a good story, with or without a moral.

Sometimes, like in the case of The Satanic Verses — and to an extent in Midnight's Children — Rushdie loses all discipline. He’s self-consciously creating a phantasmagoria, which is the danger of someone who writes in the magical-realist tradition of García Márquez: rather than injecting bits of magic into the daily lives of your characters, sometimes you dive off the deep end and create a work of fiction that really wants to be a fantasy work. This was the trouble in The Satanic Verses. Finally, Rushdie sometimes wants to paint the world as a carnival, and the brushstrokes lose all control. (Think here of the films of Federico Fellini.) Midnight's Children almost suffered from this, but Rushdie reined it in.

All of which is prologue to The Moor's Last Sigh and The Enchantress of Florence. These are Rushdie’s masterworks. They inject fantasy where it’s necessary, tell a captivating story, keep Rushdie’s frenetic intelligence in check, and never let a moral overpower the novel’s own momentum.

Structurally, the story is similar to the 1001 Arabian Nights, though it doesn’t recurse as deeply as the Arabian Nights does. The story begins at a beautiful oasis of a city, presided over by an emperor who — at least according to his PR — possesses all the virtues and none of the faults of ordinary mortals. He is the living Truth itself. He refers to himself as “We,” inasmuch as he embodies the people themselves.

Into this city, and directly to this grand emperor, comes our hero (sort of — remember that there are stories within stories, so there are several heroes) with a vast secret to tell. He’s a magician of sorts, wearing a strange coat in which endless objects can hide. Where has this strange man come from? What does he have to tell the emperor? How will he get through the many walls surrounding His Majesty?

This is the stuff of great fun. I don’t think I’m giving away much if I tell you that he does make it through to the emperor, through the use of magical potions of a special sort. Every time Rushdie could stop and tell a little story — say, about how the potions were made, or what they contain — he does, and each time he does I got tickled. These are terrific stories.

Our hero himself has a story to tell the emperor. That story constitutes more or less the entire book. Most of the time we forget that we’re inside the inner stories; Rushdie has wrapped us up completely within it. The inner story is where we hear about the character in the title: the Enchantress is the most beautiful woman in the world, the most beautiful woman anyone has ever seen or ever will see. Her mere presence causes otherwise stoic men to fall to their knees and either pray for her or pray for themselves (even the men themselves aren’t clear which it is).

And so forth. The storytelling here is without peer. Knights with skin as white as death, court intrigues, epic battles … this is a throwback to an earlier kind of storytelling, and what a skilled throwback it is.

At the same time, it’s a history piece. The grand emperor with whom we started is Akbar the Great (which, Rushdie reminds us, is redundant: “Akbar,” or some part of it, means “great”). Akbar’s ancestors, it turns out, were connected in various ways with Niccolò Machiavelli and Sandro Botticelli and Amerigo Vespucci. Did these connections actually happen? How about the court intrigues: were there any parallels to them in the real Ottoman Empire? There’s material enough in the historical bits alone to fuel research for years; Rushdie himself must have spent years just on that part. It’s great fun.

Then there’s the meta part of The Enchantress of Florence — the part that deals with the power of storytelling itself. We learn early on, for instance, that Akbar has brought a queen into existence using only his mind. His force of will is such that she becomes real, and the city eventually sees her as well. When Akbar leaves on a military campaign, he returns to hear his queen relate what has gone on in his absence. He makes love with his imaginary queen. (The creation of a real living human from sheer force of will is, I suspect, a hat tip to Calvino’s Nonexistent Knight. Rushdie does cite Calvino’s Italian Folktales collection in the bibliography, for what it’s worth.) This idea recurs throughout The Enchantress of Florence, but again: never enough to get in the way of the story itself, which is magical without being fantasy.

The Enchantress of Florence is a treasure.