The Enchantress herself, who turns everyone into puppets of her will, has no personality at all, and exists - literally - by pleasing men. Women are never treated unkindly by the author, but they have no autonomous being. This brilliant, fascinating, generous novel swarms with gorgeous young women both historical and imagined, beautiful queens and irresistible enchantresses, along with some whores and a few quarrelsome old wives - all stock figures, females perceived solely in relation to the male. They are accepted by his people, "such occurrences being normal at that time, before the real and the unreal were segregated forever and doomed to live apart under different monarchs and separate legal systems".
Some characters are the inventions of other characters: Queen Jodha, and Qara Köz, the Enchantress, are Akbar's daydreams of the Perfect Wife, the Perfect Lover, brought into existence by tale-tellers and artists and Akbar's all-powerful desire and obsession. But Niccolò's friend Argalia flies off on the peacock wings of the novelist's invention to become the bosom friend of Akbar before returning to fight for a lost cause in Florence.
Both stories are about story itself, the power of history and fable, and why it is that we can seldom be sure which is which.įabulous as his life was, Akbar was a historical figure, and one of the young Florentines is Niccolò Machiavelli, our byword for political realism. From the sea of stories our master fisherman has brought up two gleaming, intertwining prizes - a tale about three boys from Florence in the age of Lorenzo de' Medici, and a story of Akbar, greatest of the Mughal emperors, who established both the wondrous and shortlived city Fatehpur Sikri and a wondrous and shortlived policy of religious tolerance.
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