An enchanting 'Enchantress'

In the 16th century, a tall, blond foreigner rides into the heart of the Mughal Empire wearing a strange overcoat and bearing a letter from the Queen of England. The man, calling himself Magor dell'Amore, claims he has a story to tell -- a tale he must deliver to the emperor, Akbar the Great himself. If this traveler makes one wrong move, he will be killed. By meeting with this man, however, Akbar places his own life at risk. Perhaps this stranger brings not a tale, but a spell.

This fabulous scenario kicks off "The Enchantress of Florence," Salman Rushdie's magical and engrossing new novel, an East-meets-West tale about how humanistic ideas flourished simultaneously in India and Florence, Italy, epicenter of the Renaissance. The bridge between these two worlds is the enchantress of the book's title, an Indian princess so beautiful and beguiling that Rushdie keeps her from the reader for more than half the book -- as if we, too, could not bear the full power of her charms.

First we learn of her through stories and legends, descriptions of portraits that Akbar commissions after Magor dell'Amore begins telling of her. This willingness to listen is a sign of Akbar's general open-mindedness. Unlike his father and grandfather, Akbar has decided not to maraud and pillage, but spread tolerance and possibly even freedom in the country that would become India. "Was freedom indeed the road to unity," he wonders warily, "or was chaos its inevitable result?"

Chaos has many sources in this novel, but love is among the most powerful -- at least that is the lesson of Magor dell'Amore's tale of the enchantress. Hilariously, the court artist hired to paint her likeness is so besotted with the image that ultimately he paints himself into the canvas and disappears. "If the borderline between the worlds could be crossed in one direction," Akbar thinks, "it could also be crossed in the other. A dreamer could become his dream."

Packed with goblins, spells, magic, dragons, giants and all the creatures that people of the time believed in more readily than religion, "The Enchantress" carries readers back to a world in which the imagination was constantly on call. Rushdie has drilled down and found the bedrock of storytelling powers that made his 1991 "Haroun and the Sea of Stories" such a timeless, wonderful read. "The Enchantress of Florence" is the kind of novel which, when you are away from it, you feel interrupted, deprived, eager to return.

It's also basically a 16th-century road novel. As the enchantress makes her way from India to Italy, where Niccolo Machiavelli becomes one of the novel's major characters, she is chased by war. Rulers and warlords take her as a spoil, then suffer greatly when they become enchanted with her. She is a tremendous, strong-willed, deeply imagined character. Finally, she becomes enchanted with another herself and learns a terrible but necessary lesson about the nature of love.

Rushdie builds to this moment with expert care, wending and circling around his themes and detouring in terrific set pieces: Before Magor dell'Amore earns Akbar's trust and can tell the enchantress' story, he is thrust before an angry elephant, renowned for its judgment of character; Akbar is infatuated with an imaginary queen, named Jordha, with whom he makes imaginary love and against whom his other wives and concubines concoct very real schemes of revenge. Ideas and what we imagine have as much power over our lives as the tangible, it would seem. It is both the basis of the modern world, this fable gently reminds, and its terrible bane.

John Freeman of New York City is writing a book on the tyranny of e-mail for Scribner.