Salman Rushdie is a prize-winning author that most readers associate with seriousness. He is known for his richly described settings, from Kashmir to Andalusia, and he also has a position as literary negotiator of East and West. He spent a decade of internal exile hiding from the edict of a fanatical theocrat that has shaken western civilization.

Wit is strong in his latest book, The Enchantress of Florence. In the first chapter, an enigmatic wanderer enters a splendid city: “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!”

In the first part of the novel, we are introduced to the court of Akbar, the Mughal emperor of India. Akbar of course means “great” as Rushdie reminds us with one of many plays on words. As the emperor decapitates a foe with a cry—Allah Akbar, God is great, just possibly, Akbar is God, and “he begins to register a terrible melancholy that in turn leads him to establish a just city where thinkers shape the course of events.

In counterpoint, the second excerpt takes us to the novel’s other chief setting, which is Florence in the age of the Medicis. Here, we find three friends: Antonino “Nino Argalia, Niccolo “il Machia” Machiavelli, and Ago Vespucci. Amid countless confrontations and intriguing plots, the idea of a politics advised by thinkers is going to take shape.

In the midst of his politics, Rushdie introduces a number of magical and let us say enchanting elements that form the foundation of earthly powers. One of these elements is water to which all potentates and serfs are in the end equally submissive to. Another of Rushdie’s magical factors is beauty: “Is power the only justification for an extrovert personality? The traveler asked himself, and could not answer, but found himself hoping that beauty might be another such excuse, for he was certainly beautiful, and knew that his looks his looks had a power of their own. The whole world obeys the rule of beauty.”

In long passages of the fantastic, we are shown how the feminine principle makes nonsense of all forms of statecraft even those statecrafts exposed in The Prince. Rushdie turns his femmes fatales into incanted figures, seductresses of the imagination who have a lot of power in the real world.

When the fantasized Princess Qara Koz disembarks at Genoa, the toughest admiral of them all is unmanned and Andrea Doria himself “stood open-mouthed as the strangers approached, a sea–god in thrall to nymphs arising from the waters.” When the great condottiere Argalia who has protected the fickle Qara Koz, he comes to the realization that he has to save her from a vengeful mob and must die in the process of it, he did not use the word “love.”

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 was another thing.

This is a historical romance. It is a novel of epic sweeps of warfare and conquest, of murder and torture, as well as dynastic rivalries and intense struggles over the interpretation of scripture. The novel veers somewhere between Salammbo and Romola. From the Mughal and Medicis lands, the book includes the Ottoman and Persian empires and the blood–soaked Walachia of Vlad the Impaler.

Rushdie’s ideas about religion are definitely expressed in this novel. He states: “Maybe there was no true religion. Yes, he had allowed himself to think this. He wanted to be able to tell someone of his suspicion that men had made their gods and not the other way around. He wanted to be able to say, it is man at the centre of things, not god.” Rushdie wants to free us from dogma. Goodness comes from discord, difference, disobedience, and irreverence. At the temple, Fatehpur Sikiri, there is no deity. The only god is the so-called “argument.”

The language of this novel is rich with magical qualities. For example, a glowing lake becomes “a sea of molten gold,” shrieking parrots explode “like green fireworks” over the sky, and the shape of the city acquires the sensuality of a woman’s lips.

The Enchantress of Florence is an ongoing piece with readers about world and our place in it. Sometimes, we are exposed to several cultures, often in different time periods, and we are at home nowhere. Rushdie writes, once we have left our childhood, we come to the understanding that the “real secret of the ruby slippers is not there is no place like home, but there is no longer such a place as home, except for the home we construct or the homes that are made from us.” This is an interesting concept that home reside within us and it is not that home has a specific location.

Rushdie is fascinated with the sensation of being uprooted. In the Satanic Verses, Rushdie explores the flawed nature of human experience and the birth of religion. In this novel, Akbar develops a faith that includes everyone. He is thus encompassing universal consciousness. If you want to be enchanted by a spectacular novel, The Enchantress of Florence is for you.