The Enchantress of Florence
By Salman Rushdie
Jonathan Cape £18.99, 357 pages
FT bookshop price: £15.19

What on earth is Salman Rushdie’s ninth novel about? It’s not a question that reviewers, armed with the faux omniscience that accompanies an early proof copy, are supposed to ask. But bewilderment will be the initial response of most readers.

The Enchantress of Florence begins somewhere in India. A lake shimmers, beautifully, in the evening light, “like a sea of molten gold”. It is, we apprehend, the 16th century.

A traveller with flowing yellow hair is lurching towards a city in a bullock cart. He is, we dimly gather, on a diplomatic mission to the imperial city of Fatehpur Sikri, and the Grand Mughal, Akbar. The traveller’s name is “Mogor dell’Amore”, Indo-Italian for “love child of the Mughal”. He has at least two other names. He is a sorcerer. Or, perhaps, a mountebank. One of his names is Uccello. He may be an artist – a genus interchangeable with magicians in Rushdie’s fiction.

A quick visit to Mr Wikipedia tells us that Akbar was the direct descendant of Tamburlaine and of Genghis Khan. Momentarily, one feels, as Rushdie put it in an earlier novel, literary ground beneath one’s feet. We know them.

Then Akbar takes centre stage. He is just back from some ingenious torture of an uppity local potentate who made the mistake of growing a moustache larger than the Grand Mughal’s. The emperor has earned rest and recreation with his many wives, among whom his favourite is she whom he has created, Pygmalion-like, in his own mind. She is called Jodha. A quick ride on Mr Google’s mighty engine informs us that a current Bollywood blockbuster (released in February 2008), Jodhaa Akbar, broke all box-office records. It recounts the love story of the Grand Mughal (played by Hrithik Roshan) and a Hindu princess, Jodhaa Bai (played by Aishwarya Rai). The inter-faith theme has provoked riots on the subcontinent. As did The Satanic Verses. Interesting.

The first half of the novel centres on a series of audiences between traveller and Mughal. There is, it emerges, a mysterious bond between them. They are “family”. Or perhaps not.

The second half of the novel transports us, abruptly, to Florence under the Medicis. We flash back to the childhood of the yellow-haired one, now named Ago Vespucci – the brother of one of the city-state’s greatest explorers, Amerigo, who gave America its name. Ago’s bosom pal is “il Machia”, the youthful Niccolo Machiavelli, whose belief in the healing power of cornmeal connects him – as an endnote informs us – with Ian McEwan (of all people).

A third friend, Antonio Argalia, will go on to be the right-hand man of the great Genoese admiral, Andrea Doria (you can look that one up yourself). The Florentine lads’ favourite pastime is masturbating in the woods, hoping to propagate magic mushrooms. Boys will be boys.

Their adult lives are dominated by a witch abducted from the Orient by Argalia. Her image is blurred and, like everyone in this novel, she has many names: Jodha, Lady Black Eyes, Qara Koz. She it is who will tie the Orient and Occident together. Or perhaps, as in Akbar’s harem, she’s just a dream.

The Enchantress of Florence drags behind it a list of books consulted for the novel. Ever since McEwan made fools of the critics with those faux-scholarly references appended to Enduring Love, one is wary when novelists do this. For all I know, Rushdie did his research watching Bollywood movies.

So what, then, is The Enchantress of Florence about? It’s about the clash of civilisations. What point is it making? That there is as much unclash as clash. The confluences in this novel make the point artistically. And, of course, it is Rushdie’s art – specifically his writing – which makes, or breaks this novel.

I go for make. The narrative is replete with that quirkiness which, if one saw it wandering wild in Arabia, one would shout, “Rushdie!” To take a sentence at random: “When it became plain after the notorious night of one hundred and one copulations that Mohini the Skeleton’s tolerance for sex was infinite and that the prince was incapable of breaking her as he had almost broken his mistress, the slave girl’s fate was sealed.” There’s a bawdy comic novel encapsulated here. And a thousand and one like it dropped parenthetically elsewhere in the narrative.

For Rushdie, as for the artists he writes about, the pen is a magician’s wand. There is more magic than realism in this latest novel. But it is, I think, one of his best. If The Enchantress of Florence doesn’t win this year’s Man Booker I’ll curry my proof copy and eat it.

John Sutherland is professor of English at University College London