Book club - An imagination in overdrive

DR: THIS IS A RICH FEAST OF A book, but I'll start with the bare bones of plot, which weaves in and out of history, linking the civilisations of both East and West – the Moghul Empire under the wise and tolerant Akbar the Great and Renaissance Florence – which mirror each other throughout.

It does this through the story told by the mysterious stranger Niccolo Vespucci, a tall yellow-haired European who arrives at Akbar's court and claiming to be the descendant of an impossibly beautiful missing princess, Qara Koz, who was Akbar's great-aunt. Qara Koz had been the captured mistress of, in turn, an Uzbek warlord, the Shah of Persia and a Florentine mercenary, Antonino Argalia, who was the commander of the Ottoman Sultan's armies.

Argalia grew up in Florence with two other friends – Niccolo Machiavelli and his secretary Ago Vespucci, whose cousin Amerigo gave his name to the new continent. So when Niccolo Vespucci turns up at Akbar's court and stakes his claim to be the emperor's blood relative, Akbar has to decide if he believes him or not. If he does, he will effectively be offering power to a westerner; if he doesn't, Vespucci can expect to be thrown from the battlements to his death.

This, I realise, is a hopelessly reductive way of introducing a novel as richly imagined as this. There's so much more to it …

CL: So much that for me, this book would do instead of food and drink. Everything you need is in there, it's so prodigious and so capacious, and my first desire on finishing it was to go back and reread it. And I know exactly where I want to do that – reclined on a divan, covered in soft silk, eating grapes peeled by oiled Nubian slaves in the middle of a library with shelves of encyclopaedias and ancient texts from floor to ceiling from which I can pluck every one of his casual historical references. Like all of Rushdie's work, the playfulness, the passion, the erudition and the sensuousness go hand in hand. It's immensely rich and waiting to be unpacked on a whole number of levels.

DR: Where do you think it ranks in his oeuvre?

CL: Obviously there are parallels with Midnight's Children in the way in which he melds history and fantasy. One of the books of Rushdie's I love the most is Haroun and the Sea of Stories, which seems to be the perfect fairy story. This is almost like a more adult and complicated version of it, with the same extraordinary storytelling élan. So for me it's up there with Midnight's Children, it's one of his best.

RH: To me it had the same effect as St Peter's in Rome. You can see objectively it is magnificent, a work of genius, but I didn't love it. I was entranced by it, just as I am at St Peter's – there are little places there that I can go in and enjoy, but I find the totality of it too florid. Being an austere Scotsman, I find floridity a bit threatening sometimes. I thought it was a bit too lush. I got irritated a bit by the tergiversations and I didn't always know which narrator I was dealing with. All that said, I enjoyed the little theological asides and excursions in which I detected Rushdie working out his own version of the current debate about God. But overall, it's just too lush for me. Objectively, I can see that it's magnificent and it wouldn't surprise me if it did win the Man Booker. It's an intense work of scholarship if nothing else …

DRo: The six-page bibliography at the end shows he's done quite a stunning amount of research. And regarding the Renaissance, I think he's really nailed it, especially the way in which he shows just how thin the membrane was between the profane and the sacred, how things can be very high-flown one minute and extremely earthy and pungent the next. That's very much my sense of late-15th century Italian culture, and he plays with that beautifully and makes it fit in with what he wants to do.

DR: Yes, but I love the way in which he masks the obvious. His research doesn't have the smell of the lamp about it.

CL: Absolutely, he wears it lightly. So his Machiavelli is "il Machia", someone we're introduced to as a boy playing in the woods; later he's shown working on this small book that everyone ignores. Similarly, he doesn't spell out the fact that the book's first "enchantress of Florence" is the woman who was the model for Botticelli's Venus; he just gives us a clue in the nickname of "little barrels" (botticelli) and then has her turn into a vampire!

There's a similar joyous playfulness throughout this book, a refusal to go along with the "dryasdust quibblers" as he calls historians, or to acknowledge the boundaries between the historical real and the pace and depth of his magical imagination.

SK: I enjoyed it while I was reading it: Rushdie's work is as baroque, eloquent and almost overwhelmingly lush as always. At the end, though, I didn't feel it was an achievement to rank alongside The Satanic Verses or Midnight's Children because it seemed like there was all this motion and spinning, but it wasn't driving any ideas; it was lacking momentum. The big difference was the politics of the earlier books – in Midnight's Children Rushdie was dealing with the politics of partition, in Satanic Verses with theology: in both of them, magic realism – the colonial counter-narrative – had some point. But what's this book really dealing with except Rushdie's own capacity for storytelling and capacity to imagine a utopian idyll which he then reveals had to be fictitious anyway? The story is mainly about the metamorphosis of one character, the lost princess Qara Koz, whom we follow through Uzbekistan, through Persia, to Florence, uniting East and West. And at the end – guess what? – she is a fiction. I wouldn't quite say it was mirrors mirrored upon mirrors, but all the same …

ML: I agree – I was completely enchanted by the first two-thirds of this book but a wee bit disappointed by its ending, where I thought it lost its way in all the reflecting. Though I disagree about there not being politics in here. The period he writes of prefigures modernity. We are at the beginning of the capitalist age; east and west are coming into increasingly complex contact; and the joke about il Machia's "little book", ie The Prince, is that it is modernity. Also, the bibliography is a signal of political intent. For all the imaginative brilliance, it is still grounded in fact.

CL: I take Stuart's point that there isn't a single identifiable purpose to the book, but I thought it was about the ferment of ideas and the art of the possible and that applies all the way through – it is about story and about art, but it is also about that moment when things could have gone in any different direction.

ML: I guess the main danger of the story not going anywhere in the end is a slight risk of banality. But in terms of story, this is clearly a superb work of genius, very richly imagined, funny, playful, erudite and hugely enjoyable.

RH: I was intrigued to note that the William Dalrymple books don't figure in Rushdie's references. Dalrymple's thesis about Islam is that at the time of the Moghuls it was a hedonistic open-minded religion that got ruined by evangelical Christians and Muslims and that the kind of angry extremist Islamicists we see today you can trace right back on a powder trail to the Last Mughal. I'm just wondering whether Rushdie is doing anything here with reference to today.

CL: Certainly with Akbar, he gives us a portrait of a man feeling his way towards modernity. And for me that exploration was enough and the ending almost beside the point, because the book is all about change, continuous change. At some point Rushdie says "a prince like Akbar had to ride the metamorphoses" – and that's what this book is doing too.

I think he's clearly made the decision not to keep banging home the message of relevance to the present. A lesser writer would have done that all the time; instead, he raises topics – like the possibilities of independent action by some of the women at the court – and soon drops them again without fixating on them, but I like the openness of all that.

SK: I think your point about the book creating the kind of openness that Akbar was also trying to bring about in his court is a very good reading of it, but I still yearn for the Rushdie who had a bit of fight in him – this seems a retreat into phantasmagoria. I've just finished reading Imprimatur by Rita Monaldi and Francesco Sorti (published in May by Polygon], admittedly written in a different style to this but also dealing with big themes of terror, religion and history, and it worked for me much more than Rushdie's slightly seigniorial "don't bother with the facts" attitude.

SM: I'm not one of those people who regularly criticises the writing of female characters in any book, but by the end it was slightly annoying me that it seemed to be either beautiful alluring and mysterious or wily manipulative harridans or, like the two prostitutes Skeleton and Mattress, so extreme that they're just metaphors. There wasn't a single female character that I found satisfying. Qara Koz was the closest, but even so, I think there was a bit of stereotyping going on there.

CL: I know exactly what you mean, but that belongs more to the land of fairytale and storytelling that he is inhabiting.

SM: I accept that, but I'm still not sure why he, as a modern writer, is falling back on those stereotypes. That said, I enjoyed this book and its richness is a treat for the imagination. There's a marvellous evocation of time and place, both at the Mughal court and in Machiavelli's Florence, and consistently deft, masterful and often funny writing.

This book is about storytelling: stories about stories, stories within stories. It asks questions about the uses of storytelling, about what writers do. But, as others have said, I wondered why he is telling us this story now.

Of course there's nothing wrong with escapism – and in terms of literary escapism this is like a holiday in a five-star hotel – but in the end I wanted this book to give me more insight into the relationship of East and West in these difficult times.

Meet this month's panel

RICHARD HOLLOWAY (RH) is an author and broadcaster and former Primus of the Scottish Episcopalian Church.

MARC LAMBERT (ML) is CEO of Scottish Book Trust, the national agency committed to promoting reading and writing.

DAVID ROSENTHAL (DRo) is a historian of renaissance Italy.

STUART KELLY (SK) is Literary Editor of Scotland on Sunday and author of The Book of Lost Books (Penguin).

CATHERINE LOCKERBIE (CL) is the director of the Edinburgh International Book Festival.

SUSAN MANSFIELD (SM) is an arts and features writer on The Scotsman

DAVID ROBINSON (DR) is books editor of The Scotsman.

'Magic was all around and would not be denied'

IT WAS important not to offend against the laws of magic. If a woman left you if was because you did not cast the right spell over her, or else because someone else cast a stronger enchantment than yours, or else because your marriage was cursed in such a way that it cut the ties of love between husband wife. Why did So-and-so rather than Such-and-such enjoy success in his businesses? Because he visited the right enchanter. There was a thing in the emperor that rebelled against all this flummery, for was it not a kind of infantilisation of the self to give up one's power of agency and believe that such power resided outside oneself rather than within? This was also his objection to God, that his existence deprived human beings of the right to form ethical structures by themselves. But magic was all around and would not be denied and it would be a rash ruler who pooh-poohed it. Religion could be rethought, re-examined, remade, perhaps even discarded; magic was impervious to such assaults. This, finally, was why the story of Qara Köz had so easily possessed the imagination of the people of Sikri. She had taken her magic, "their" magic, into other worlds, worlds with their own occultisms, and her sorcery had proved more potent than theirs.

Her sorcery. Which not even he, the emperor, could resist.

The magical issues regarding the foreigner Niccolò Vespucci, the self-styled Mughal of Love, could be stated as follows: was his presence among them a blessing or a curse? Would his elevation to high rank result in the empire being blessed, or would it, by offending, against some dark law of Fortune, bring down disaster upon the realm? Was foreignness itself a thing to be embraced as a revitalising 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 initiative a process of decay which would end in an alienated, inauthentic death? The emperor had taken advice from the guardians of the unseen realms, the palmists, astrologers, soothsayers, mystics and assorted divines who were in plentiful supply in the capital, particularly in the vicinity of Salim Chishti's tomb, but their advice had been contradictory. He had not asked the foreigner's fellow Europeans Fathers Acquaviva and Monserrate for their opinions, for their hostility to the storyteller was well known. And Birbal, oh, his beloved, wise Birbal was gone.

He was left, in the end, with himself. Only he could choose.

The day ended. He had not decided. He was meditating at midnight beneath a crescent moon. She came to him, all in silver, silently, and shone.

© Salman Rushdie. From The Enchantress of Florence, Jonathan Cape, priced £18.99.