The Aztecs are a bellicose superpower, conquering the world through their technological superiority. Britain is the latest to fall, with the Royal family in hiding in rural Wales.
Evans’ alternate history is flawlessly executed without drawing too much focus; articulated with a constant drip of colourful details in newspapers, TV, brands, and pop culture. The novel shares a detailed and engaging Aztec culture without assuming prior knowledge, and the use of hard-to-pronounce Aztec names is handled well with enough differentiation to avoid reader confusion.
For most of the book this is the backdrop for a quiet study of colonialism and conquest; a narrative reversal of the British empire that doesn’t succumb to simplistically portraying the Aztecs as savage bad guys, but instead explores the fuzzy line between accommodation and collaboration as the population pragmatically adapts to the new status quo. By making Britain the occupied nation, Evans removes rote answers and forces us to confront these questions afresh from an unfamiliar perspective.
However, the narrative payback for this thoughtful worldbuilding never arrives — the pacing was slow and the plotting rarely advanced, lingering instead on character development and court drama. I spent an enjoyable few hundred pages in Evans’ Aztec world, but the destination was never clear and I expect I’ll have a hard time relating a concrete story to interested readers.
In the last few pages, the narrative shifts suddenly and delivers a flurry of unearned twists and action, culminating in a finale at odds with the moral ambiguity that had made the novel compelling. This whole denouement feels rushed, contrived, and unnecessary, undermining the hard work done building character and motivations, raising more questions than it answered.
As a coherent alternate history, this is one of the best, asking readers to wrestle with uncomfortable questions about colonialism, adaptation, and collaboration. As a novel, however, it’s forgettable, ending with a rush for thrills that abandons the very questions that made it interesting.
