Aztec by Gary Jennings

This l-o-n-g novel is truly multi-purpose.

If you want to learn about all aspects of the Aztec people--their history, their Flowery Wars with neighboring tribes, their religious beliefs and practices, their language and picture writing, their dress, their lifestyle, their buildings and temples and pyramids, their great city Tenochtitlan, and so forth--then this is certainly the book for you. The author spent twelve years in Mexico researching and learning the language of the Aztecs, and by all accounts has provided a very accurate picture of that world.

If you enjoy a picaresque novel with a lively and intelligent hero whose many adventures include the observation of and participation in all of the most historic events, you will find this is the book for you. It is the story of Mixtli, who rises from a lowly station in life to become a scribe, a traveling merchant, a warrior, an explorer, an adviser to rulers, an interpreter for the Spanish conqueror Cortes, and a chronicler to King Carlos of Spain of the history of himself and his people.

If you find it interesting to read specific details about the violent and blood drenched religious practices of the Aztecs or about the atrocities perpetrated by the Spanish in the name of king and religion, then choose this book. Readers not only learn that the foul deeds are done, but also hear in graphic language exactly how they are accomplished. The account of the method for ripping a beating heart from the breast of a sacrificial victim is particularly visual in its description.

If you are amused/titillated/aroused by accounts of various sexual escapades, then by all means read this book. It includes sexual episodes of all kinds for a variety of tastes: incest, child/adult sex, object-assisted self gratification, male-male sex, female-female sex, and even regular old male-female sex. Sorry, no bestiality. One particularly noteworthy sub-plot involves an Aztec princess who, when she tires of sexual partners, has them killed and boiled to remove the flesh from the bones, and then uses the skeletons as the foundations for life-size statues.

All of this is put together as a first-person oral account by Mixtli, given to the Bishop of New Spain, to be sent to the king of Spain. Throughout, the author gives his narrator a sly and ironic voice, as he pretends to be a loyal subject of the king and a Christian convert, all the while portraying the Spanish in a very unfavorable and mocking light and seemingly slipping in the sexual matters to shock and/or excite the prurient interest of his listeners. (And surely the author was being doubly ironic here, intending the same result for his readers.) As such, the story is often unexpectedly amusing. For example, ostensibly praising the high sexual standards of the Spanish, the narrator says, "I can truthfully say I never saw a single Spanish soldier rape one of our women except in the one orifice and one position permissible to Christians."

Written in 1980 and still in print, this novel is well executed and better than most of its kind. It beats James Michener's history-based novels by a mile. It's not a book for the ages, but any book of over 1,000 pages that can become a best seller and then stay in print for over 30 years has got to have something going for it.