Salman Rushdie: The Enchantress of Florence. A review.

Salman Rushdie's The Enchantress of Florence finds him on familiar, East-meets-West ground, as a Florentine refugee turns up at the Mughal court, says Tim Adams in a Guardian review.

368 pages hardcover; Jonathan Cape; First Edition First Printing edition (3 April 2008)
ISBN-10: 0224061631 ISBN-13: 978-0224061636 (details from Amazon)

'This book is a load of old cobblers' I was thinking most of the time I was reading it. It teeters on the brink of being thrown over in favour of something else and indeed I almost gave it up on more than one occasion in favour of something more intelligent and sensible, but then it beguiled me into reading another page and another page.

It is a conjuring trick; a hall of mirrors.

So I kept on reading one more page until in the end I discovered I had been reading a masterpiece; a cultural, historical and human tour de force. It seems, superficially, to be nothing much more than artful, colourful fluff, a tiresome confection, but, by the end, the 'fluff' has consolidated into, or perhaps better, out of the fluff has appeared a magical evocation of an age and its people. I put the book down having read the last page stunned by its audacity and its artistry. It is a work of art, of genius, superficially frivolous, totally profound. 'Old cobblers', it transpires, joined end to end, maketh magic.

The story is the story, overall, of the renaissance mind.

It is the time of Shakespeare and Elizabeth I, but set elsewhere. Niccolo Machiavelli in Medici Florence, The Ottoman empire in Turkey, the great Mughal emperor Akbar in India, the discovery of the New World - these are the fixed points in a shimmering mirage of a tale. Wonderful.

It is a complete waste of time until, at the end, you realise what Rushdie has done.

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