The Enchantress of Florence, Salman Rushdie, 2008, Jonathan Cape, price not stated.

If you are the kind of reader who begins at the end, you will first bump into the six-page-long bibliography appended to The Enchantress of Florence. Despite this, Rushdie’s latest novel remains a rich re-imagining of history with hardly a trace of the scholarly heaviness that one has come to expect of fiction that grapples with historical and political themes. The enchantment, thankfully, is alive and kicking — at least for the most part, and the narrative retains a seductive lightness. But while readers escape the fate of having to plod their way through historical detail, there is another path, the path of mirrors and reflected story lines in Mughal India and Renaissance Florence, that they have to traverse. This then is the trade off, essentially.

While The Enchantress of Florence is a story about many things and a story about story-telling itself, it is anchored, if somewhat insecurely, around the visit of a yellow-haired European, Nicola Vespucci or Mogor dell’Amore, to the court of Akbar. Claiming that he is the son of Akbar’s grand-aunt, the European restores public memory of Qara Koz or the hidden princess who was cast out of Mughal history for choosing her conqueror over her family. The hidden princess becomes the ultimate traveller in this cross-cultural tale, a traveller who shifts allegiance with disloyal ease. When Akbar falls in love with her memory, moving his imagined queen Jodha out of the way, it is a love that smacks of incest and blasphemy.

Probing around the gaps of history, Rushdie delves into the minds of historical characters such as Akbar to string together a multi-themed narrative about time, travel, identity, power, desire and story-telling. The over-arching metaphor that binds these themes together is the mirror: the hidden princess has a slave girl who is her mirror, the Florentine Argalia is, to an extent, the mirror of Mogor dell’Amore, Jodha Akbar has a mirror in the hidden princess, the Mughal artist Dashwanth who paints Qara Koz and the Florentine artist Filipepi who paints the other enchantress in the novel, Simonetta, are mirrors of one another, and so on. On a larger scale, the Mughal empire and Renaissance Florence mirror each other as well. As Mogor dell’Amore tells Akbar, “This may be the curse of the human race…Not that we are so different from one another, but that we are so alike.” As the stories twist and turn in front of mirrors, reality becomes a mirage. The lake at Sikri is a mirror too, reflecting the shifting fortunes of the city.

His irreverent self with his usual irreverence, Rushdie transforms Akbar into a fictional character, exploring his psyche at leisurely length. There are insightful if somewhat tongue-in-cheek comments on Akbar’s attempt to switch to the democratic “I” from the royal “we” and the difficult issue of handling power, the ethical burden of being king. On the other hand, Qara Koz’s access to power is of a very different sort. She has to be enchantress in order to rule. The identity of women in the narrative is highly fluid and under constant threat.

There is a downside to reading The Enchantress of Florence which perhaps those who know Rushdie would in any case anticipate: it is overdone in parts and at times the story more than runs away with itself. There is also the curse of the long sentence: perfectly constructed and reasoned out no doubt, but still a bit over the top. Take, for instance, this one: “[Akbar learned] about the dignity of the lost, about losing, and how it cleansed the soul to accept defeat, and about letting go, avoiding the trap of holding on too tightly to what you wanted, and about abandonment in general, and in particular fatherlessness, the lessness of fathers, the lessness of the fatherless, and the best defences of those who are less against those who are more: inwardness, forethought, cunning, humility, and good peripheral vision.” The occasional lapse into hyphenated coinage is no less annoying: “‘He must have been mad to bring you,’ Argalia told her when blood-filthy and kill-sick he found her abandoned at the death-heavy end of the day.”

In Rushdie’s universe, there are two kinds of people: those who travel and those who prefer not to. Jodha as the queen who never leaves the palace thinks of travel as something that removes you “from the place in which you had a meaning, and to which you gave meaning in return by dedicating your life to it.” In this, she is like Ago Vespucci, the Florentine, who believes that it isn’t “necessary to go questing across the world and die among guttural strangers to find your heart’s desire.” Yet, stories travel only because people travel — people like Mogor dell’Amore, Argalia and Qara Koz herself. Connected to travel is the notion of time. Mogor dell’Amore tells Akbar that in the new world, “the ordinary laws of space and time did not apply”, that time had been introduced to this world by the European voyagers. The point of the novel, however, is not that one culture is superior to the other but that both are equally fantastic, that both abound in stories and that travellers ensure that these stories, which are really mirrors of one another, travel back and forth.

One can’t help feeling victimised at times by the mirror itself. Its many reflections, made possible by a Rushdiean cleverness, get a bit tedious and reading the novel begins to feel like work. Fortunately, Rushdie’s humour compensates for much of this. We smile when Rushdie describes Queen Gulbadan: “When Gulbadan started climbing the family tree like an agitated parrot there was no telling how many branches she would need to settle on briefly before she decided to rest.”

The Enchantress of Florence is a book that will work for readers who are okay with getting a bit lost. Like Dashwanth, the artist who disappears into his paintings of the hidden princess, Rushdie demands that we permit ourselves to be sucked into his magic world of mirrors.