The novel centers around Akbar the Great, the Mughal emperor of India and his fictional encounter with a Florentine adventurer who has come to his court with a story to tell.  The story this Florentine, who calls himself Mogor dell’Amore, tells comprises the bulk of the novel but doesn’t begin until more than a third of the way through.  Before that story begins, other stories and ideas and beings are created and introduced: we meet the thoughtful Akbar and learn how Mogor came to the emperor’s doorstep; we learn that through the force of his imagination and will that Akbar has created the perfect woman, Jodhabai, to be his Queen; and we learn of the wondrous kingdom, the apotheosis of culture and thought that he created.  And Mogor’s story brings into being a lost Mughal princess, Angelica, Qara Köz, Lady Dark Eyes, whose story and beauty capture the hearts and lives of all she encounters, both those within the story and those who hear it.  For Rushdie, all imaginative acts, especially narrative ones, are generative; they bring things into being, into life.

This profusion of narrative, of story, is an act of creation, even if used for destructive ends.  As Rushdie knows, the most powerful, persistent stories are religious in nature, so the truth of a story has little to do with its power or its resilience.  In many ways, this novel, much like The Satanic Verses, tries to contend with the power of religious stories.  At one point I thought, “This is his book against god,” which would connect this novel with the recent bestseller by his good friend and fellow atheist Christopher Hitchens.  But Rushdie is too respectful of the power of story to capture us, to imprison us, to dismiss religion out of hand.  However much he may want people to abandon these old stories, he knows we will hold onto them regardless of the anachronisms, the untruths, the full brief that the New Atheists level against religious belief.  We are believing creatures, as Rushdie shows in novel after novel.  The novelist may be able to tell a story engaging and moving enough to capture our minds for a moment, perhaps even for centuries, for the length of posterity, but the breadth and strength of that hold will never supplant that of religious myth.

How well has Rushdie succeeded in this novel in his professional rivalry with religious myth?  The story of Qara Köz is as enthralling as everyone in the story claims it is, but the story around feels flat and not simply in comparison.  I think the flatness of his prose can be attributed to the omniscient voice that he adopts.  What has always given Rushdie’s prose its vitality, and what does so in the Qara Köz sections, is the personal, multi-lingual voice bubbling over with the story it needs to tell.  Mogor’s voice is like that, but until he begins his story, so late into the novel, Rushdie employs an omniscient third-person narrator that maintains a great psychological distance from his characters and from his readers.  The question of voice and point of view determines the distance between the reader and the action of the narrative, and this voice as employed by Rushdie is very removed from the events and characters of the novel, a remove that the readers come to share.  This point of view is called omniscient because it affords the writer the most power to shape his story, but it also approximates the view that an omnipotent being would have of human activity: disinterest, even boredom.  While this decision may have been dictated by the structure of Rushdie’s novel, it does weaken it and make it less engaging than it might have been.

Another thing differentiates this novel, and all his recent novels, from his great early novels.  The protagonists in those early novels were characters who had been disgraced or defeated in some way, who told their stories in hopes of posthumous vindication.  History had taught them that they were inconsequential, did not matter regardless of how close they may have come to greatness.  His latest novels, and this one is no exception, are about the unequivocally great.  Akbar means “great” so his name literally means “The Great Great One” or ”His Great Greatness”.  The main characters of Shalimar the Clown are the greatest beauty of her time, the greatest diplomat of the age, and the great assassin who hunts them.  No more does Rushdie write about failures, even ambitious ones, as he once did, and at least for this reader, that makes his characters much less likely to illumine the reader’s self.