by Salman Rushdie.

Random House. 355 pages. $26.

BY SAM COALE
Special to the Journal

Hold on to your sorcerer’s cap, your witch’s brew, your sexual fantasies — unguiculation, anyone? — and your magic mirrors! We’re off to the Mughal court of Akbar the Great in Fatepur Sikri, India, in the 15th century, and to Renaissance Florence, both brimming with intrigue, assassination, sexual revelry, Medici popes (Leo X), Machiavelli (in a fascinating fictional portrayal), spells, brothels, Uzbegs, Turks, Persians, parades, unguents and oils, and Skeleton and Mattress, two winsome wenches. Oh, and the dissipated conniving Crown Prince Selim, eager to knock Akbar off his Mughal throne.

In this exuberant, rambunctious, jubilant novel, Rushdie’s at his luminous, yarn-spinning best. Every narrator in this multi-layered, labyrinthine mock-epic is a performer, including Agostino Vespucci, who comes to Akbar’s court to woo him with a tale of his own shady and exotic past.

Is he the son of Qara Koz (“Black Eyes”), the spellbinding femme fatale who gets it on with shahs, sheiks and sultans, and is the hidden princess, who mesmerizes the rollicking city of Florence, in an astonishing history that links her to Akbar’s father?

This is also the post-modernist romp of three childhood friends: Niccolo il Machia (Machiavelli), Antonio Argalia (who becomes a warrior, a Turkish pasha, Qara Koz’s lover and with his janissaries the defender of his native Florence), and Ago Vespucci, (world-traveler and champion tale-teller at the Mughal court). Their lives become intertwined with historical events throughout as Rushdie weaves a tapestry of golden threads, and blood-stained but glistening patches.

Rushdie seems intent on revealing how exotic the West looks to the East, and vice-versa. Akbar comes to recognize that “the curse of the human race is not that we are so different from one another, but that we are so alike.” And that “of the vindictiveness of princes there is no end.”

But Akbar’s also wrestling with the notions of an autonomous self, sprung from the existential turmoil of the Renaissance: a new “I” is arising: “It is man at the center of things, not god . . . [but] could a god, once created, become impossible to destroy?” Machiavelli’s also hot on the trail of a new and disturbing humanism.

It’s the entire performance you’ll savor. Rushdie’s keenly aware “that witchcraft requires no potions, familiar spirits, or magic words. Language upon a silvered tongue affords enchantment enough.” We will continue to murder and create, but we can also spin and sparkle. THE ENCHANTRESS OF FLORENCE,

samcoale@cox.net