Salman Rushdie has at least two sides: the funny, witty raconteur who had the audience eating out of his hand while introducing Midnight’s Children in Harlem, and the geeky dungeonmaster who wants you to care about his elaborate terraforming. (Three, if you count vexed by protesters or critics and made profane by the interruption.)

For the first time I find myself agreeing with Michiko Kakutani. The Enchantress of Florence is very much in the second mold. It’s not badly-written, but it’s historical fiction, unusually dry for a Rushdie tome, lacking much of the wordplay and sparkle of Rushdie’s best. It recalls the driest world-building passages of Grimus and Jahilia in The Satanic Verses. Check out this excerpt; it’s tens more pages of that.

The plot is merely a digression from Philosophy 101 musings about the nature of self, duality and the stewardship of a kingdom. They’re never as gripping as the chautauquas in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance; the first third of the book is engaging…

Not far from the caravanserai, a tower studded with elephant tusks marked the way to the palace gate. All elephants belonged to the emperor, and by spiking a tower with their teeth he was demonstrating his power. Beware! the tower said. You are entering the realm of the Elephant King, a sovereign so rich in pachyderms that he can waste the gnashers of a thousand of the beasts just to decorate me.

… but the remainder didn’t capture me. Predictably, the Jalaluddin Akbar element is better-drawn than the bulk of the book, which is set in Italy and rehabilitates the images of both mercenary warlords and Niccolò il Machia, a.k.a. Machiavelli.

Many of Rushdie’s stylistic tricks are reused here, dragged caterwauling into daylight by the lack of enchantment. Characters are paired in mirror worlds: a hidden princess and her Mirror, prostitutes nicknamed Skeleton and Mattress. As in much of Márquez, Akbar’s physical state is reflected and magnified by his entire city. The author defends his writing style from less-imaginative critics and shouts out to his previous books.

Though strong as usual, the women of Enchantress are defined largely by their sexuality. They’re whores, temptresses, concubines, fluffers, cuckolded queens, but you rarely peer into their minds. Rushdie is content to gawk at great beauty with the flatness of a Sports Illustrated cover shoot. Present too are both sharp digs and sloppy Valentines for ex number quattro, the Lotus Queen:

For the last time in his life he wondered if he had wasted his love on a woman who only gave her love until it was time to take it back. He set the thought aside. He had given his heart this once in his life and counted himself blessed to have had the chance to do so. The question of whether she was worthy of his love had no meaning. His heart had answered that question long ago.

The U.S. cover is lovely, but contains an ill-advised description of Rushdie as ‘one of the world’s most important authors.’ ‘Important’? I’d take ‘talented,’ ’surprising’… ‘Important’ is the sign hanging above the abbatoir.

I enjoyed Rushdie’s last, Shalimar the Clown, far more than Enchantress. ‘Write what you know’ is a decent rule; ‘write what you’ve read’ isn’t quite as interesting. It’s still got some of the Rushdie charm, of course; and if you’re a fan of historical fic, you may have a different take.

Christopher Hitchens stood up for his amico’s latest:

The erudition is dexterously deployed, with a heartening leaven of demotic obscenity… we are shown how the feminine principle makes nonsense of all forms of statecraft, including even the cleverest ones adumbrated in The Prince, and how the distance between the boudoir and the bordello or zenana or harem is disconcertingly short…

Akbar objects to the divinity on… massively heretical grounds… In the person of a man who was ‘by repute arrogant, egotistical, and a fanatic proselytizer of Ithna Ashari, that is to say Twelver Shiite Islam’… it is perhaps not fanciful to discern the outline of a prototype Khomeini…

… the River Arno betrays Florence by going dry for a year and a day, and a similar lethal aridity causes the crumbling of Akbar’s great and noble city at Fatehpur Sikri. In which direction can the parched imagination now turn? A clue may seem to lie in the first name of another young Vespucci of Florence: the ‘Amerigo’ who gave a vague yet unforgettable title to the concept of a new world. [Link]

Previously: Soft launch, Mojo returned, The Enchantress of Florence