The Enchantress of Florence, By Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie has long been adept at fusing fantasy and realism, pulling off spectacular narrative flights of fancy. In The Enchantress of Florence, in order to wriggle out of trouble, a mysterious visitor to the Mughal court gives account of himself, thereby giving the novelist a way into his own Florentine romance. Despite the ensuing tales of sorcery, superstition, imaginary lovers and a woman so beautiful that charming "the birds from the trees" is less an apt trope than bona fide day-to-day activity, the riskiest leap of all is in the form and style of the novel itself.

Rushdie and his visitor's mode of telling are littered with playful reminders of the absurdity of desire, history and historical narration. In a piazza, a victory in battle is celebrated with such force that many actors in the pageant have to be taken to hospital: "some of them unfortunately died". Historical personages get the full Baz Luhrmann treatment: "il Machia" (Niccolo Machiavelli, whose path crosses that of the Enchantress) and his posse swear like Florentine rude boys.

While some of this is fun, the prose can seem at times lacklustre, with Rushdie determined to stick to a "once upon a time" kind of colourful kitsch. There's a fine line, however, between deadpan and deadening, and it takes only a moment of real Rushdie poetry – "He was meditating at midnight beneath a crescent moon. She came to him all in silver, silently, and shone", or the unnerving des-cription of the Angel of Death: "He spoke perfectly the dialect of the region, and that made people wonder if Death always came in a local manifestation, so to speak, using your slang" – to make you feel hard done by.

The Mughal court and the Medici's Florence are an inspired pairing, offering 1,001 alternative tales of raucousness and real-politik from East and West. The account of Florence's "sex-crazed nocturnal culture" ("the houses of ill-repute and those of good reputation were both full of love") is frank and detailed, but it's not very often that the partakers are given room enough to become interesting as opposed to just incidental.

The lives of the artists, writers and rulers, when given more space, are far better served. The whole novel is haunted by a sly, gentle account of Botticelli's muse, at the centre of two of the loveliest paintings in Florence, La Primavera and The Birth of Venus, and the shadowy relationship between Machiavelli and the Medicis is humanely teased out in a totally fresh way. Author of The Prince, he's brought to life as more than an intellectual thug. The portrait of his wife is off-kilter, funny and sad, and the account of his own torture, imprisonment and exile is brilliantly melancholic. The Enchantress herself, for too long not much more than a rumour in the narrative, finally metamorphoses into an emotionally powerful, genuinely seductive creation.

The ability to move and to be darkly memorable even in the midst of massive narrative high camp, makes it is easy to see why this strange tragicomic cocktail of a form appealed to its creator – not the strange Mughal of Love, of course, but Rushdie himself. Novelists, unlike the courtesans prancing with careful abandon on almost every page of the work, are, after all, not meant to rely on just a handful of practised tricks.

While it seems churlish to expect a writer to find a form and stick to it, nonetheless it's testament to the powers of the teller to find yourself now and again hankering for some of the more familiar magic.