Aztec by Gary Jennings
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Sifting Through the Wreckage

The 16th century Spanish Invasion of the Americas was a disaster that spread with the speed of a tsunami. Certainly so for the native populations which were killed en masse or enslaved. But also for the conquerors (and the rest of us) who lost the accumulated wisdom and beauty of highly sophisticated civilisations which only lacked the technology of violence and the viral antibodies of their opponents.

Having destroyed these civilisations, the Spanish immediately set to work trying to recover their characters and histories. Testimonies of survivors were recoded, languages documented, and cultural practices commented upon. Eventually these led to archaeological and sociobiological investigations. One hopes that at least some of these efforts were prompted by a growing guilt that the extinct cultures had been misunderstood and underestimated through the prevailing prejudices of the time.

But the problem the Spanish friars had persists: how does one reconstruct the existential reality of these defunct civilisations from the diverse fragments of evidence, residue really, that are available? What did the world look like to these ancient people? What were their presumptions about themselves and their societies? What made life worthwhile (or hellish) for them?

These are questions that go beyond the ability of social sciences or academic history to answer. Only fiction can bring together the myriad factual threads into some sort of coherent narrative. The art of creating this kind of narrative is tricky. It can easily degenerate into a completely artificial adventure with an essentially pre-historic hero as the object of projection of modern concerns and causes. Or it can become an essentially illiterate mask for the promotion of various theories about the lost worlds.

Gary Jennings was a master of historical narrative who could navigate his way through the Scylla of fantasy and the Charybdis of the bad science fiction. He is able to take the bits of theology, politics, law, social organisation, personal status, even diet, that have been gleaned through centuries of research and make them a comprehensible whole. He uses informed imagination to fill in the gaps. The literary device Jennings employs, the sworn testimony by an elderly survivor to the local bishop and his scribes at the command of the King, allows the development of numerous themes without the need to incorporate relevant background into a separate story-line.

The result is a kind of intimacy with the Aztec culture that is remarkable. The real value of the book, I suggest, is the exposure by contrast of one’s own moral, social and political presumptions. The Aztecs were a rather sophisticated and diverse people who developed an effective, interesting, often instructive, sometimes inspiring programme for coping in and with the world. Jenning’s books, therefore, seem to me essential for anyone interested in Mesoamerican history and sociology.

View all my reviews