A very human story

A week after The Enchantress of Florence was released, its author Salman Rushdie was in the news for dating a young woman, Aimee, who is a para-Olympian long jumper with amputated limbs. The reason I know so much about Mr Rushdie's amours is that they were pressed on me; like many of his fans, I would have preferred his private life to remain private, but in this day and age, that is not to be.

Rushdie's celebrity status has overtaken his gifts as an author over the course of his last few books, and this has the effect of making his more loyal readers deeply uncomfortable. We admit in private that Rushdie has not produced anything worthy of note since Midnight's Children and perhaps Haroun and the Sea of Stories, but the man's luminous appearances on the celebrity pages continue, despite our uneasiness. If The Moor's Last Sigh was barely satisfactory, works like The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Fury and even the slightly better Shalimar the Clown made generations of Rushdie fans reconsider their devotion to the man.

It didn't seem to matter in the wider world: regardless of the level of his talents as displayed in his writing, Rushdie made the news. The fatwa and its continuing repercussions forced us to pay attention, though he did some of his worst and most risible work in the fatwa years. His marriage to Padma Lakshmi, a rising model, and divorce kept us busy for well over a decade. It reinforced the idea that Rushdie was Rushdie; initially famous for being a writer, he no longer needed to write well, or even to write at all, in order to be celebrated.

Anyone who reads The Enchantress of Florence with even a degree of dispassion will be dismayed, even outraged, by this book. Take the plot: in the court of a bored and ennui-ridden Akbar, a young European makes his appearance. He calls himself 'Mogor dell' Amore', the Mughal of Love, and claims kinship to the emperor himself. His mother, Qara Koz, or Lady Black Eyes, has spent her life fighting for independence in lands as far apart as Persia and contemporary Florence; meanwhile Jodha, Akbar's beloved, fights for her right to be more than just a member of the harem.

Set down in this fashion, The Enchantress of Florence sounds dire: Mills & Boon inflated beyond measure, festooned with high literary devices, and it is true that Rushdie often sounds as though he has swallowed and regurgitated encyclopaedias of the period.

But apply what editors think of as the classic Rushdie test: send this book out, without a byline, to those who might appreciate Rushdie's prose. I must confess that when I did this with Rushdie's last two books, the editors I sent the manuscripts to rejected them unconditionally, as ersatz and tedious imitations of the master. Armed with an advance e-book copy, I sent The Enchantress of Florence out in similar fashion: the consensus was that Mr S Rushdie had returned to form.

In his delineation of two very different worlds, the Mughal court in transition and the world of Europe at a time of flux, Rushdie is spot on and his immense reading rarely overwhelms the text. It is hard beyond measure to create more than a caricature of one of the great Mughals, but his Akbar is fully realised and very deeply human. Akbar holds this book together; his ennui, his fascination with small things, his love of life keep us going. This is no small achievement. To say that The Enchantress of Florence is the best of Rushdie's recent work is to diminish it. He has attempted, but never written, another Midnight's Children, and it is unrealistic to expect that he ever will. There are, indeed, times when Rushdie's heavy-handed sense of humour weighs the narrative down; there are points where he tries to juggle too much, and fails. But in the end, this book asks where the divisions lie between East and West; it analyses the differences between two apparently related cultures, and it tells a very human story. Skip Fury and Shalimar, but read this.

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THE ENCHANTRESS OF FLORENCE

Salman Rushdie
Jonathan Cape
£18.99, 359 pages