Michael Dirda

While The Enchantress of Florence mainly lingers in the memory as a paean to the power of beauty, it is also a meditation on power, tout court. The world can turn against beauty, just as it can turn against intelligence or spiritual conviction or noble ideals. Machiavelli -- soon to write The Prince-- warns the Mughal princess: "This is Florence, my lady, and you will live well here, for Florentines know how to live well. But if you are sensible, you will always know where the back door is. You will plan your escape route and keep it in good working order. For when the Arno floods all those without boats are drowned."

But what should one do with power? Akbar the Great begins to wonder about the nature of his sovereignty and about the self, the universe, religion and the growing interaction between East and West: "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?" Akbar, in fact, daydreams of universal harmony on Earth but sadly recognizes that all his power can never make it happen:

"Once he was gone, all he had thought, all he had worked to make, his philosophy and way of being, all that would evaporate like water. 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. In the future it was harshness, not civilization, that would rule."

Such sentiments point at the 21st century, and may jar as a result, but they are just one aspect of this dream-like pageant of a book, with its cloud-capped towers and gorgeous palaces. Rushdie risks bathos, for instance, when he refers to "The Great Uzbeg Anti-Shiite Potato and Sturgeon Curse." He calls four albino giants Otho, Botho, Clotho and D'Artagnan, recalling by turns a Roman Emperor, a German family name, the Fate who cuts the thread of life and a would-be Musketeer. In this case, you feel that he's just being silly.

No matter. At least for the summer ahead, The Enchantress of Florence will certainly live up to the romantic promise of its title. As Akbar himself reflects, "Witchcraft requires no potions, familiar spirits, or magic wands. Language upon a silvered tongue affords enchantment enough." ·

Michael Dirda's e-mail address is mdirda@gmail.com