Chamber Four

Author: Salman Rushdie

Random House, 2008.

Best ebook deal: Seattle Public Library

The plot of The Enchantress of Florence concerns a beautiful woman and three young friends whom history remembers: I won’t reveal them here, figuring them out is part of the game.

The real subject of the novel, however, is storytelling, and the power of a narrative, and the lines between art and life.

Rushdie frames his plot with the entrance of a young Westerner who has come to an Arabian Mughal’s (emperor’s) kingdom to tell the Mughal an epic tale.

Nested within that tale are such episodes as the emperor’s imaginary wife, whom he wishes into existence, and also the greatest painter in the land, who disappears into his best painting, to live as he must, as a work of art.

There’s no denying that Salman Rushdie is one of the greatest living novelists in the world. He has a talent for language that permeates nearly every sentence of this latest work. And he obviously enjoyed writing Enchantress, his delight is evident on every page, and his bibliography (four and a half pages long, including dozens of citations) suggests a bit of an obsession with the historical side of it.

He threw in beautiful details, intersections with history (including references to Vlad the Impaler, Amerigo Vespucci, Andrea Doria, Ghengis Khan, Niccolo Machiavelli, and others), and he did a wonderful job of creating a vivid historical simulacrum, where perfumes have magical properties and syphilis is a witch’s hex. The best parts of the novel arise when that richly imagined world is plucked at like a harp, and the lives and actions of the characters echo in ripples throughout the fabric of the novel.

For instance, in one charming episode, Qara Koz, the beautiful, titular enchantress, arrives in Florence and begins flouting local custom by taking evening walks, a woman alone in the city. Slowly, the local women follow her lead and come out of their self-imposed house arrest. With the women about, the gentlemen “finally had good reason to stay away from the bordellos. The city’s whorehouses began to empty and the so-called ‘eclipse of the courtesans’ began.”

This kind of detail makes for a vibrant, shimmering world in which to have a novel, and ultimately that world is the book’s best feature.

Not the only feature, though. Enchantress also has more than its share of verbal jousting and word games (including Rushdie’s careful, though playful, obfuscation of the identities of his famous central characters), all of which make for a rich, if eventually tiresome, reading experience.

Ultimately, this novel feels more like a dalliance than a project of enough weight to match the talent and effort that went into it. The core themes of the book—storytelling, the nature of fiction—were popular 35 years ago, when John Barth wrote his retelling of “The Arabian Nights,” Chimera. If I’m to be captivated by them again, I need some new tricks, and Rushdie never quite delivers.

The historical dalliance has also been tried by Michael Chabon, and E.L. Doctorow (with more success by the latter), but those were light, quick reads. Doctorow’s Ragtime might still be the best of the genre.

That might be the failing of Enchantress, its language is too rich and its games too layered to invite a page-turning fireworks display like Ragtime. And yet the scope of its plot never quite justifies the effort it takes to follow it. It’s ultimately a simple story told complexly, and unsatisfying as a result.

Similar books you might like: Chimera by John Barth; Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon; Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow