‘The reader wanders through Hunt’s richly imagined Tenochtitlán in a beautiful stupor.’‘A distinguished travel writer, Hunt enlivens his city with the sorts of passing details that make a place concrete: a dancer is masked like a crocodile, merchants sell rubber balls outside a sports arena, a woman eats “popped maiz”…’
‘The novel’s surface is brilliant, yet its deeper significance remains elusive, even if the resonances with our own end times are everywhere.’
While this review is mixed (essentially the reviewer wanted the novel to do something else) there are some very nice bits in there. Beautiful stupour is perfect.
Here it is in full:
“Toward the end of things, one thinks about beginnings”, says Eli Ben Abram, the narrator of Red Smoking Mirror, Nick Hunt’s fanciful debut novel. It is 1521 – or the year 3 House in the calendar of the Mexica people – and Abram, a Jewish merchant, is observing the downfall of Tenochtitlán. But this isn’t end times wrought by Spanish conquest. In Hunt’s counterfactual history, Islamic Spain never fell and it was Muslim merchants who made first contact with the civilizations of South America, in the 1490s. Facing our own end of things in the Anthropocene, Hunt seems to be thinking about beginnings. If history had taken one or two crucial turns, could it all have been different?
By 1521, there is something rotten in the state of Mexica. The merchants of the caliph have grown fat and lazy; the emperor, Moctezuma, is cryptic and withdrawn; and the social fabric of Tenochtitlán is showing signs of wear. Bad omens abound. A nearby volcano is starting to smoke; a deadly disease is ravaging the city’s poorest quarters; and an Islamic warrior named Benmassoud is bearing down on Mexica. Unlike the members of the liberal Muslim merchant class, he is zealous and austere, a man of “desert purity”. His plan is to convert the Mexica – and Abram – and dispense with the benevolent order that has made this a place of uneasy tolerance. In answer to these inauspicious signs, more and more human sacrifices are ordered: men who “give their blood to feed the sun, to keep it spinning”.
The reader wanders through Hunt’s richly imagined Tenochtitlán in a beautiful stupor. Against the familiar Mexica backdrop of soldiers in jaguar skins and eagle feathers, Muslim traders construct mighty camel caravans to transport the splendours of South America back to the caliph. “This city of divisions” and “this city of wonders” owes a debt to the dazzling urban constructs of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1972) – a debt increased by Hunt’s decision to have Abram sit with the emperor Moctezuma and play backgammon (see Marco Polo playing chess with Kublai Khan in Invisible Cities). But this is not to say that Tenochtitlán is derivative. A distinguished travel writer, Hunt enlivens his city with the sorts of passing details that make a place concrete: a dancer is masked like a crocodile, merchants sell rubber balls outside a sports arena, a woman eats “popped maiz”. The choices are playful, though the style is not. Red Smoking Mirror is relentlessly solemn and almost entirely devoid of humour – at least intentional humour: the tenderness of Abram’s feelings for his mysterious wife Malinala, a former slave and possibly a key figure in Benmassoud’s impending invasion, is made ridiculous when, during a scene of lovemaking, he declares that “She is the Goddess of Bright Sweat and I am the Lord of the Root”.
The novel’s surface is brilliant, yet its deeper significance remains elusive, even if the resonances with our own end times are everywhere. The climate changes, a pandemic rages, and social divisions are exacerbated; in the resigned faces of the human sacrifices who give their lives to prop up the universal order, one cannot help but think of the “essential workers” whose lives propped up the Covid economy. But is Hunt’s Tenochtitlán merely an elaborate echo, an obsidian mirror (a “smoking mirror”) of today, or is he exploring something deeper by altering the history of colonialism?
Apparently, he isn’t. In an afterword, the author says that, in replacing the Spanish with men like Abram, he isn’t arguing that things would have turned out better for the Indigenous people of Tenochtitlán. The downfall of their civilization, with attendant cultural genocide, would still have been inescapable, and presumably the same goes for our modern-day apocalypse. This sense of inevitability makes the choice of writing a counterfactual history perplexing. Red Smoking Mirror, Hunt states, is “first and foremost a work of fantasy”, and on that level it is a success. But it seems strange to go to such extraordinary lengths to show that the past is rather like the present, or that the present would have been the same, regardless of the past. Not only does this feel politically troubling – a free pass for European colonialism – it also undermines the intrinsic interest of the counterfactual genre. By keeping history largely as it was, Nick Hunt teaches us nothing new about what it might have been.