2023/075: Red Smoking Mirror — Nick Hunt

And what is there left to say about this walk through Tenochtitlan? Only that dogs are everywhere and that the sun is dark ... Only that the smoky sky is teeming with frightened birds, that the temple steps are wet, that body after body rolls down the angled, steep decline, their torsos blue ... [loc. 2013]

Eli Ben Abram is a Jewish merchant, born in the Caliphate of Andalus and now trading in the New Maghreb. He came across the Sea of Darkness to Mexica, in the first fleet of traders: now he lives in the great city of Tenochtitlan, in the shadow of the Smoking Mountain, with his Nahua wife Malinala. The traders from Andalus have prospered among the Mexica, but there are rumours of a great Moorish army bound for the city, there to root out the impurities of tubaq and xocolatl. And there is dissent among the elders of the Moorish quarter; and Malinala tells her husband tales of the Thirteen Heavens and the Nine Hells, the Five Suns, the Smoking Mirror, the Feathered Serpent...

This is a world in which, as Hunt says in his afterword, "the Reconquest never happened. The Islamic Golden Age .. continued into the Age of Exploration; and Spain, as we know it today, never came into existence. ... the first ships that crossed the Atlantic were crewed by seafaring Moors rather than by Spaniards." [loc. 2362] Hunt depicts a more peaceful (and less disease-ridden) meeting of the two cultures, though the seeds of bloody conquest have already been sown. There are some familiar historical figures (the emperor Moctezuma, La Malinche, and a Genoan named Christoforo) and, as the novel progresses, a sense of historical inevitability. Eli is an intriguing narrator, with his helpless love for his young wife, and the secret he's carried with him since he met a man from Genoa in a tavern in Cadiz. He sometimes seems wilfully blind to the undercurrents of what's happening around him, and he is sometimes less than kind to those he encounters: but his admiration for Mexica culture (evocatively described) runs through this novel.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this full honest review. UK publication date is 06 JUL 2023.