SALMAN RUSHDIE'S new novel is a hall of mirrors. They distort and flatter, and above all, like those mirrors set by exits onto dangerous roads, they reveal what is hidden. Two great civilisations, the Moghul empire of Jalalluddin Muhammed Akbar, and the Florence of the Medicis and of Machiavelli, reflect on each other while they are linked by a series of fairytale improbabilities.

A yellow-haired man who calls himself Mogor dell'Amore (Moghul of Love) arrives at Akbar's court in Fatehpur Sikri with a story of his descent from a lost Moghul princess of astounding beauty called Qara Köz. This enchantress was the youngest sister of Akbar's own grandfather. On his father's side Mogor dell'Amore claims descent from a Florentine called Nino Argalia, who left home as an orphan boy to join the condottieri, was captured in battle by Turks, enslaved and forcibly converted to Islam.

Through his skill in battle he became not only a free man but a Janissary of the Osmanli Sultan. The victorious 45-year-old Argalia first met Qara Köz on a battlefield, after she was abandoned by her protector, the defeated Shah of Persia.

As the Mogor dell'Amore tells his story, Akbar recognises a kindred spirit who “wants to step inside the tale he is telling and begin a new life inside it”. The Enchantress of Florence is a book that takes on as many new lives as the yellow-haired storyteller. It is “about” the Emperor Akbar, “about” Renaissance Florence, “about” three childhood friends and their destinies, “about” a woman whose power over men has a certain inhumanity at its core, “about” seduction, memory, power, religion, art, rationality, tolerance and intolerance and the fire lit by the deepak raga of the great Hindu composer Miyan Tansen. It's a novel in which ideas make insistent patterns, and are forced into some surprising unions.

In fact, whether it is a novel at all in the usual sense of the word is doubtful. It's a haul of stories, gathered with magpie glee, arranged to glitter. Self-consciousness is one of the book's main purposes. Rushdie keeps coming back to his reflections on the nature of story itself, and the way in which a human being understands himself and his dilemma through story.

In two crucial mirror-passages, characters are imprisoned and stripped of light, freedom and hope. In the first, strangers arrive at Akbar's court and denounce the Moghor dell'Amore as a murderer, whereupon he is thrown into a dungeon. The horror of this experience is both physical and existential. “All men needed to hear their stories told. He was a man, but if he died without telling the story he would be something less than that, an albino cockroach or a louse. The dungeon did not understand the idea of a story.” In the second such passage, Rushdie brilliantly describes the imprisonment and torture of Machiavelli, and the influence of the dungeon on Machiavelli's ideas. “He had served the people and they had paid him in pain, in that lightless subterranean place, that place without a name in which nameless people did nameless things to bodies that were also nameless...”

Machiavelli, like Akbar, has a full and subtle presence. Both men question the arrangement of their societies. Machiavelli does so through politics and writing; Akbar, who cannot read or write, by example and decree.

Akbar was noted for religious tolerance; he abolished the jizyah tax on non-Muslims, established a forum for open religious discussion at Fatehpur Sikri, and attracted the finest Hindu musicians and artists to his court. Clearly Akbar is a man after Rushdie's own heart, and some of the most thoughtful writing in the book concerns the fulfilling power of Akbar's imagination.

By contrast, other characters tend towards a richly elaborated two-dimensionality; Rushdie's representation of Qara Köz as a fatal enchantress is conventional rather than persuasive. The portrayal of women is a weakness of the book. Rushdie adorns with considerable artistry the clichés of the pragmatic, good-hearted whore, the disappointed, querulous wife, and the beauty before whom all men bow down. In an odd mirroring of Kipling's assertion in The Ladies that “The Colonel's lady an' Judy O'Grady/ Are sisters under the skin”, the prostitutes Mattress and Skeleton suggest to the Emperor that the answer to the aggression of Fatehpur Sikri's women is to force them all to go naked in public for a day.

The Enchantress is not really about Qara Köz, or Simonetta Vespucci, or any other fabulous beauty. For all its proliferating surface dazzle, this is a book with few illusions. One after another the stories drop like masks. The solitude, harshness and illogicality of human life are accepted almost casually, without surprise.

The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie
Jonathan Cape, £18.99; 356pp

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