The Enchantress Of Florence by Salman Rushdie

The Enchantress Of Florence by Salman Rushdie is a thoroughly entertaining read. It’s a super-real experience, so vivid and sharp that the focus starts to blur even imagined distinction between the real, the unreal and the surreal. And when everything becomes clear, the process starts again.

We are transported to the sixteenth century and the court of the Mughal Emperor, Akbar the Great, who has many concerns. Akbar, indeed, has all the concerns you would expect any self-respecting emperor might have. He agonises, for instance, over being “I” or “We”. Usually, of course, as befits his status, he is “We”. He has grown up as “We”, assumed himself to be “We” and continues to recognise himself as “We”. But recently he has tried “I” and found it lies strangely on the tongue and might even have changed his reflection in the mirror.

On top of this, he worries about his succession, the indolence and ambition of his offspring, the comfort of his harem, the performance of his armies, the future of his fortunes. But Akbar is also the ruler of a vivid imagination. His favourite queen, the one who adds grace to his harem, the one whose every step must be upon polished tiles, exists only in his imagination. He spends more time with her than with any other of his wives, and she probably consumes more of the palace budget than anyone, so perfectly does Akbar desire to provide for her insatiable needs.

So what might Akbar the Great make of a fair-haired young man in a multi-coloured coat who arrives with a story to tell, a claim to make and tricks of the hand that can be explained as illusions? His name is Uccello, bird, when we meet him aboard ship. Then he is Vespucci, a relative of he who had in the recent past sailed to and named the real new world that Columbus had both missed and misinterpreted. 

And later he transforms into Mogor dell' Amore, the mughal of love, or perhaps with a little imagination, the Mughal’s love-child. And more than that, he arrives bearing a letter from the Queen of England, herself a virgin in her own legend. Uccello Mogor Vespucci, whoever he might be, also has a claim. He is a direct descendent of the Mogul royal line by virtue of an almost forgotten princess, Qara Köz, who as an infant was abducted, traded, swapped, travelled, perhaps trammelled until she emerged in Florence as a young woman of enchanting, perhaps bewitching beauty.

Mogor Vespucci Uccello related how he and her apparently permanent, inseparable assistant, her Mirror, captivated the interest of Medici Florence. Suitors queued at the door, including Argalia, if indeed that be his name, a soldier of fortune. The abandoned princess is then adopted by European high society and learns to live by its rules. She has liaisons whose confusion is only doubled by the constant proximity of the Mirror, and offspring springs outward. Now for an emperor who already has the facility of imagining his favourite wife, Vespucci Uccello Mogor’s story fires the mind, re-ignites memory and raises possibility.

He dreams dreams, interprets them, re-interprets what he doesn’t like and then seeks them in reality, only to find them. A conjoined history that spans Asia and Europe unfolds and he, alongside the reader, sees the familiar in a new, conflicting light. But in the end, who is telling stories? Are the stories true? And, if we can imagine, who might judge them to be false? Is this trickery? Or is it claim? The Enchantress Of Florence is an enchanting read. It is provocative, humorous and in places iconoclastic. Fiction and fact become blurred and, even in reality, we can hardly distinguish between them. We create stories to enhance our experience and sometimes we believe them. Sometimes we also deign to believe what is real, but often we cannot agree on a definition of the label. It’s a magical experience, a conjuror’s achievement.

The Museum Of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk

The Museum Of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk presents what might appear to be a daunting challenge. It runs to more than 500 pages and a flick through the text reveals scant use of dialogue. It all looks very dense. There is also the added challenge of knowing that the novel is set in an unfamiliar cultural landscape, underpinned by assumptions we may not share, assumptions that we may not even recognise.

But no reader need be daunted. I read it – and even re-read some sections – in less than two days. Rarely have I been drawn by a writer inside a character in the way that Orhan Pamuk invited me to become Kemal Bey. The book is a perfect example of a work that tells you nothing, but takes you all the way there.

Kemal is a rich young man at the start of the book’s recollected but largely linear story. It is 1975. Kemal has returned from business school in the USA and has taken up a perhaps assured position in Satsat, literally Sell-Sell, his family’s distribution and export company. It’s a successful company, making money hand over fist, and provides its owners with both status and wealth. Kemal is part of Istanbul’s, even Turkey’s elite, a rich man even among the rich. He can have what he wants. His life is on a flat track in the fast lane from the start. He is close to engagement and marriage to Sibel, a beautiful woman he loves.

And then one day Kemal visits a shop to buy his girlfriend a present. He recognises the girl who serves him as the daughter of a distant relation, a woman he used to call Aunt Nesibe. There was no direct blood tie, perhaps, but ties with this poorer branch of the family were stronger when Kemal was young.

Hence he remembers the shop girl who serves him as Füsun, Aunt Nesibe’s daughter. She is just 18, has bleached hair in the modern style and promises an imminent and full bloom of womanhood. Kemal is transfixed and from that moment on his life is changed. The Museum Of Innocence – at least in part – is a novel about obsession. Kemal wants to possess, to own every aspect of Füsun. He yearns for her body – that might be taken for granted – but he also wants to absorb her, in some ways to become part of her. 

For him she is a Madonna, a sex object, a future wife, an analyst, a support and a superstar all in one slight, beautiful frame. He changes every aspect of his life so that it fits the shape she projects merely so that he can metaphorically and literally wrap himself around her. In one of their encounters, she loses a monogrammed earring. Kemal finds it, but doesn’t return it. And so this earring becomes the first of many things associated with Füsun that Kemal collects. Eventually these thousands of artefacts become the exhibits in his museum dedicated to her, Kemal’s museum of innocence.

But Orham Pamuk’s writing is never merely one-layered. In The Museum of Innocence he takes us on a tour of Istanbul’s high society and culture. We experience – not just observe – clashes of culture, tradition versus modernity, family versus individuality, responsibility versus interest. Events that made Turkish history of the period affect everyone’s lives. Political and economic change go hand in hand, though sometimes the hands are fists. We meet Zaim, for instance, whose company makes Meltem, Turkey’s favourite domestically-made soft drink.

But as the years pass, can his brand compete with Coke and Pepsi? And if so, what tactic should it employ to find its market? Should it use Western advertising methods? Kemal also meets Feridun, a budding film director who, via various mechanisms eventually persuades Kemal to finance a film company as a joint venture. Lemon Film’s first offering is hammered by the urban critics, but poor communities throughout Anatolia can identify with its traditional message and so it becomes a capitalist hit. Kemal has success is almost every aspect of his life but not, it seems, in love, a subject he confines to his museum. He becomes, incidentally, a compulsive museum visitor!

A review of The Museum Of Innocence cannot begin to offer a flavour of the entire book. Its canvas is too broad, its achievement too great, its success too complete. Obsession is the key word, however, and Orhan Pamuk manages to draw the willing reader into Kemal’s psyche, so that his tunnel vision becomes an obsession for the reader. We see his world through his eyes, and thus feel what he feels. Perhaps we even empathise. Looking back, The Museum Of Innocence, like life itself, is not such a long journey after all.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid

Initially, the form of The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid seems forced. Surely it will restrict what the author can achieve. By the end, however, the form has become a crucial part of the plot. The turnabout then works very well indeed.

Changez has returned to Pakistan from the USA, where he both studied and worked. He is in conversation with a foreign visitor to his country. Apparently they are sitting in a café. The visitor is probably an American but, surprisingly, the conversation is entirely one-sided.

Basically, Changez tells his life story, eventually relating in detail the conspiring events that led him to his current preoccupations and status. He was the child of an upper class family in Lahore. He was a bright thing from the start and when the time was right a place at Princeton beckoned. He excelled and was offered a job with a business consulting group, where he learned much more than merely contemporary jargon. He also fell head over heels in love with an American girl, herself a gifted student with a desire to write.

She wanted to tell stories, beginning perhaps with one featuring herself and describing her former boyfriend’s struggle with terminal illness. Initially at least she seems newly besotted with her new Pakistani friend, with Changez’s unexpected and wholly foreign politeness, good manners and dress sense all creating favourable impressions. The silent listener absorbs all this without comment as he and Changez await their food in a Lahore restaurant.

Everything looks rosy for our graduate and the listening tourist seems to respond to the raconteur’s story. The narrator then begins to describe a new era, an era that began on September 11 2001 and the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York. The Reluctant Fundamentalist’s tone changes abruptly as the world and the individual’s place in it seem to need reinterpretation.

As things turn out, Changez returns to Pakistan, where he takes up teaching. And still our listener absorbs the story without response. The book’s denouement is both surprising and satisfying. The form that has seemed to be a handicap suddenly contributes to the experience. We are left with an enigmatic, open ending where surely something will happen.

Mohsin Hamid perhaps allows each of us to fill in some blanks. Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist is quite a short book. It possibly just exceeds the novella form. But in a succinct and sophisticated way it addresses and comments on some complex issues. Its methods are both sympathetic and involving. Its efforts convince the reader without being didactic. It is thus a significant achievement.

The Battle For Spain by Anthony Beevor

Occasionally, very rarely in fact, one comes across a thoroughly outstanding book. From beginning to end it’s authoritative, clearly written, lucid and somehow both committed and balanced. Eventually such a work will take a clear position, but it will never approach polemic. Such books are indeed rare, but Anthony Beevor’s The Battle For Spain is without doubt one of these few great works.

The Battle For Spain chronicles the Spanish Civil War, 1936-9. Anthony Beevor examines the political, economic and social background of the country prior to the war. He identifies historical context and offers explanation of why Spain found itself in a position of near-irredeemable political impasse in the 1930s. He also examines the movements, parties and associations that existed at the start of the struggle, alongside institutions such as the Church and monarchy that also played significant roles.

So well portrayed is all the in-fighting, intrigue and manoeuvring that we feel we almost get to know the characters involved. The reader constantly has to remember that this is not mere fiction. Its immediacy almost tricks us into thinking that these events might be just some thought-up plot created merely to keep us involved. 

But then the casualty figures start to stack up and we are reminded by the executions and the refugees that this is a bleak and stark reality. The story’s detail may come as a surprise to the casual reader who remains unaware of just how intense and bloody this conflict was. Anthony Beevor also provides the essential geopolitical context of the Spanish Civil War. He identifies how the rise of fascism and communism in the years preceding the war both played their perhaps inevitable roles by backing their favoured sides in the conflict.

It was inevitable in a Europe that was already unstable. Spain was a prize that would add weight to any interest. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of The Battle For Spain is its description of the role played by the northern Carlists. Much has been written about the Falange, the POUM anarchists and the communists. But little usually emerges about the religious conformists who played a significant role on the Nationalist side.

The character of Franco eventually comes to dominate proceedings. He is revealed as obviously victorious and without peer, but he also sometimes dithers, lacks judgment and seeks rather unsuccessfully to play off one side against another. He is not alone, however, in that the British and the French displayed the same skills or ineptitudes, depending on which side you take.

But where The Battle For Spain excels is in its catalogue of the horrid events of the war. The detail of Anthony Beevor’s account really brings out the confusion of conflict alongside the luck and opportunism on the one hand and incompetence and chance on the other. It’s a cocktail of these that grant both victory and defeat. Just ask the dead, the wounded and the refugeed.

None To Accompany Me by Nadine Gordimer

Life often presents an illusion of constancy or even continuity. They are illusions, of course, because ultimately we can never take anything for granted. Just ask the last friend who died. Equally, however, there are always things that we work towards, goals whose continued non-achievement gives life both meaning and direction. Surely we fear their achievement, because everything would then have to be redefined, a process that would prove at least messy.

This is the territory of Nadine Gordimer’s novel None To Accompany Me. For me the title signifies how every individual, when confronted with the necessity for change, must pursue personal, perhaps even selfish goals.

In None To Accompnay Me Nadine Gordimer presents characters in a newly-liberated, but as yet ill-defined South Africa. The struggle has been long. It has also been defining for its participants. It allowed differences to be ignored, splits to be papered over. It convinced some of a necessity to over-react, to over-compensate. 

And then, when the uniting goal is achieved, all realise that opposing is a less complicated act than supporting. We all know what we are against, but what we are for can only be argued. Like Byron’s Prisoner Of Chillon, experiencing the security of captivity can seem reassuring when the unknown of freedom is finally achieved.

Vera is as central a character as any. She’s white, married to Ben, has a daughter and has worked for liberation. She devoted just less than her life to the cause, less because she has retained an element of selfishness in her personal relations. So loosely intertwined are all of the strands of her life that change in one can apparently unravel all of them. And then there’s Dydimus and Sibongile, also lifelong devotees of the cause. Opportunity begins to divide them. So does their past. There are new positions of responsibility to be adopted, politics to be worked out, compromises to be made. But there are also deeds from the past lacked away, skeletons that can be marched out for other’s convenience.

And not all of them are personal. The major issues of the time appear in the book. Cultural and economic differences between black and white cannot be escaped. Neither, it seems, can the prevalence of violence and crime. A pressing need to redistribute land will have to engage in battle with those who own it and want to exploit it. A nation whose majority has never been asked its opinion has to learn to live with the fact that the question’s answers now promote division above the assumed unity of the past. And, if this is not already sufficient complication, those released from struggle must also come to terms with a generational shift.

Progeny do not seem to have the same values. Whereas community was demanded by struggle, freedom promotes the individual, allows personal decisions that the older generation would not have tolerated. A reader looking for a linear experience with characters wheeled on and off the set in order to assist a plot’s continued progress will truly hate None To Accompany Me. A reader with the patience to get to know people, to empathise with them and share their dilemmas will appreciate the non-linearity, non-literalness of Nadine Gordimer’s book. It is certainly a novel of its time, a period of uncertainly presenting perhaps an illusory cusp between a known past and an unknown future. Eventually we must ask if this state is anything unusual.

Voyagers, travel stories by Philip Spires

People should not do quite a number of things, including reviewing their own work. Well, I suppose that’s another resolution I have just broken, because here is Philip Spires’s review of Voyagers by Philip Spires. Voyagers is a set of short stories loosely based on the experience of travel. They all portray a srong sense of place alongside characters that find themselves in unfamiliar settings. Several of the stories have grown out of personal experience, or sometimes events I witnessed along the way. I have traveled a little over the years and it has always seemed to me that when a voyager ventures beyond the habitual comfort zone, then the potential for surprise and challenge increase, thus presenting opportunities to learn. And that learning, as often as not, is about oneself. Voyagers begins with Discoverers, a novella. Mr Tony has worked several contracts as an expatriate biology teacher in Brunei. We meet him as he sets off with yet another group of students on a field visit into the rain forest. These are jungles he knows well and loves. They are, however, under threat, and are being burned by people trying to establish building rights. Mr Tony has a campaign against these illegal practices and his efforts are about to uncover publishable truth. He learns over a long weekend, however, that people of power have their own schemes to stop his work. Assessors is a grovelling email written by a professional of the future who has seen his status redefined. The story was inspired by an interview with the physicist Michio Kaku. On a morning when London Heathrow’s new terminal could not match passengers with their luggage, he confidently claimed on BBC Radio that the near future would confirm our ability to tele-transport entire molecules in real time. Initiates is also set in Brunei. Aussies Ted and Sylvia have been invited to a Malay wedding. Ted works alongside the bride most days and knows her well, well enough of course to be invited to this normally wholly local event. Despite easy-going friendship and apparent shared experience, however, there is one part of the day’s custom that reminds both Ted and Sylvie that they remain mere guests in this place. I know that the principal characters of Protesters did in fact meet. One, a president of a Central American republic outlawed by the West was to address a solidarity group meeting in Westminster Central Hall. An aged writer – and a very famous one as well – is also present. His personal history suggests a pointed conversation between the two men, a conversation that forms the story. I put them together for a few minutes before they emerge to deliver their speeches. Predators is set in Nya Trang on Vietnam’s beautiful coast. A holidaying couple find themselves witness to predatory acts along the hotel corridor. Candid observation of the society and their surroundings suggest that such exploitation might not be too rare. A few decades later, the memory comes home. Seers is set in pre-war Yugoslavia. A group of Australian travellers are caravanning across Europe. In a Dubrovnik café they meet a bar-fly who likes to brag about the quality of his contacts. There may be truth in some of his words. He may even be the arms dealer he claims to be. Who knows? Strangers is the shortest of the stories. Set in England’s north Devon, a couple on a long weekend seek rest and recuperation in an idyllic coastal village. They idyll soon fades to a reality as they learn more of local lives. Victims is a set of emails. An aid worker finds herself caught up in the complications of struggle in Sri Lanka. She seeks advice on how to deal with the unique position she occupies by virtue of the information she has learned. Who does she think she is talking to? Whose interests will prevail? And is she, herself, now in danger? Wonderers follows a retired Englishman who is trying to pay his personal homage to wonders of the ancient world. These dependable, classical, trustworthy images of unquestionable greatness and significance offer him confirmation of the psychological stability and order he craves. His means of accessing them, alongside the contrasting and challenging experience of visiting them offer up difficult questions, however. He finds an answer that surprises him. Worshippers is set in Florence. A recent art school graduate finds her life at a crossroads. Her secular upbringing has created a near-religious commitment to art. But her own identity and self-obsession often appears at the centre of her universe. She meets a resting actor, a man whose pragmatism seems at first to be attractive. But he is troubled by something, an emotional response she resolves to uncover. They do seem to share a passion for art until, that is, aesthetics get in the way. Voyagers thus examines how a traveller’s identity might be simultaneously questioned and confirmed by the surprising moments that arise when we are beyond our own context. The voyagers themselves sometimes emerge both richer and wiser, but sometimes their limitations are merely confirmed. Voyagers is available both as a paperback and an ebook, including a Kindle edition.

The Honorary Consul by Graham Greene

Graham Greene’s The Honorary Consul is a deceptively ambitious project. And this applies as much to the reading of this great work as to its writing. The novel addresses some great themes on a multiplicity of levels and in every case succeeds in both illustrating issues and provoking thought via a deceptively simple story of kidnap and espionage. 

 The Honorary Consul is set in Argentina. We are in the north, far from the sophistication of cities, on the banks of the Paraná River, cheek by jowl with Paraguay. And over that border there is the iron-fisted rule of the General, an oppression that has created a social orderliness based on fear and persecution. About twenty years ago, a victim of that oppression, an Englishman resident in Paraguay, put his wife and young son onto a ferry to Argentina. He stayed behind to rejoin the struggle and was not heard of again.

The wife took up residence in Buenos Aires and devoted herself to gossip and sweet eating. The son, Eduardo Plarr, went to medical school, qualified and, at the start of the novel, is practising his profession in that small, provincial, northern town. His thoughts regularly cross the river to contemplate his father’s possible fate.

It is by virtue of his father’s nationality that Eduardo calls himself English. Eduardo is one of just three English residents in the town. Humphries used to be a teacher, while the third, Charles Fortnum, has the title of Honorary Consul. His role is minimal, of course, and his status is less than that. But he ekes a few bob out of the role by the resale of the new car he has a right to import every two years.

Charles is a heavy drinker, preferring whisky of all types, but willing to drink almost anything in the right measure. He and the other two English residents frequent the same bars, restaurants and brothels, and so they also share the same sources of pleasure. Eduardo is surprised to learn that Charles, a sixty-year-old slob, has married one of the girls – a twenty-year-old stripling – from their favoured haunt. He wonders how it will all work long before he becomes her doctor and thereby provides the most thorough examination that medical science knows. When she falls pregnant, she at least is sure whose child it is.

And then one day visitors from Paraguay bring news of Eduardo’s father. They have a plan. There is to be a visit by the American ambassador. Charles will actually have to do something. There is to be a visit to a local site. The group of opportunistic Paraguayans plan a kidnap. They will hold the ambassador until named detainees in Paraguay, Eduardo’s father amongst them, are released. They carry out their threat, but bungle it. As Charles Fortnum’s car passed by, they mistook his CC plate for CD and thereby kidnapped the wrong man.

Instead of an American ambassador, they have a merely an honorary consul, and one without much honour. El Tigre, their remote, anonymous commander is clearly not pleased. We never get to know much about El Tigre, but then perhaps we know more than we think. As ever in Graham Greene, the characters are presented with moral dilemmas. In The Honorary Consul these span the domestic, the religious, the familial and the political.

A short review can do no justice to either the complexity of the ideas or the economy and subtlety of the writer’s treatment of them. Tragedies ensue and there is even a happy ending of sorts. A former priest – there’s no such thing as a former priest! – grapples with the contradictions of liberation theology on the one hand and the obedience demanded of servile duty on the other. Graham Greene does not resolve all the dilemmas he raises. Good writing, after all, is not about answering questions. But it does necessarily involve asking the right ones.

The Honorary Consul is the work of a writer of genius at the height of his powers. It is also the work of a man with a keen sense of politics and morality. And it is also surely one of the few books that all people should list as a must read.