Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford: Small-time crooks and big-time bootleggers

Here’s a bit of obscure and nerdish history for you. In 1938 the American science fiction writer Jack Williamson published a novella called The Legion of Time in the pulp magazine Astounding Science Fiction. The plot of The Legion of Time hinges on one choice made by a guy called John Barr. At a crucial childhood moment, Barr will either pick up a magnet, leading him to a life of science (and the world to a Utopia called Jonbar), or he will pick up a stone, leading him to a life of mediocrity (and the world to a tyranny called Gyronchi). Hence, the key moment in an alternative-history story – the forked-path choice that branches to a different world – is known to science fiction fans as a Jonbar Point. A tiny change at the Jonbar Point, and Hitler’s invasion of Russia succeeds; the Spanish Armada overthrows Elizabeth I.

The Jonbar Point of the alternative American history presented in Francis Spufford’s new novel is gratifyingly subtle. Spufford explains it in a note: “what makes this altered America in this 1922 different is that, in this timeline, it was the variola minor or alastrim form of smallpox that came out of West Africa first, and was carried across the Atlantic in the ‘Columbian exchange’. Alastrim has a death rate of 1 per cent rather than 30 per cent […] As a result, the indigenous populations of North America sickened […] but then recovered.” West of the Mississippi, therefore, in Cahokia Jazz, Native American peoples still thrive. Indeed, they rule their own city-states, Cahokia – located across the Mississippi from where St Louis in reality stands – being the largest.

In actual history, Cahokia and its peoples were wiped out by 1350 or so. Spufford’s Jazz Age version is a modern American city: a noirish place of delis, tommy guns, small-time crooks, and big-time bootleggers; it even has a hotel designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. But it has also been shaped (a brilliant touch) by the advent of Jesuit missionaries in the 17th century; it is consequently Catholic, even if its Catholicism is heavily inflected by the older religions of the Mississippian cultures. There is a sun king, a moon goddess; locals conduct public rites wearing wooden masks of the Four Winds.

One of the signal achievements of this exceptional novel is the generosity and rigour with which it conjures up Cahokia. Spufford’s creation absolutely feels like a place you could visit, or could have visited, if you happened to be travelling westward across the United States in the year of modernism, 1922. Spufford has imagined a history, a culture, a full suite of territorial and ethnic tensions; he even knows when and where the Cahokian trains run. And every detail is pertinent to his beautifully buttoned-up plot. And there is no clumsy expository dialogue.

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The simplest hook for any narrative is a murder; and the quickest way to evoke a multifarious fictional locale is to set an obsessed cop ricocheting from high life to low, in search of a killer. Spufford knows this. His obsessed cop is homicide detective Joe Barrow. Enormously tall, raised in an orphanage, a veteran of the first World War, and of uncertain ethnic background, Barrow is also a gifted jazz pianist. As the book begins he is called out to the roof of the Land Trust, one of Cahokia’s three central civic skyscrapers. Here a white clerk, Frederick Hopper, has been butchered according to the ancient rules of Aztec sacrifice. In short order Barrow and his semi-crazed partner Drummond discover that Hopper was in the Ku Klux Klan; from there, over the course of a single crowded week, a baroque conspiracy unravels, in punctilious noir style (“Fifty-seven varieties of dark,” thinks Barrow, up on the Land Trust rooftop, announcing part of his generic inheritance).

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As a piece of narrative entertainment, Cahokia Jazz is more or less unimprovable. You sink into it; you are gripped, you are moved, you turn the pages greedily. It has obvious influences: it clearly owes something to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s great graphic novel Watchmen (1986-1987), and to the involuted urban fantasies of China Miéville – in particular to The City and the City (2009), with its metaphysically overlapping Mitteleuropean cities. (Miéville is thanked in the acknowledgments.) But it also feels new: which is to say that Cahokia Jazz is no mere beguiling bricolage of genre tokens but rather a virtuoso synthesis of popular narrative forms, aspects of religious myth, and deep currents of real history.

“Symbols and their power,” Joe Barrow thinks, early on, naming the novel’s true subject. As the Cahokian Sun King, pulling the strings of the murder investigation from on high, tells him: “Sometimes, symbols move solid objects […] without the meaning of things, without the stories people tell about them – that people believe about them – you can’t understand events, Detective.”

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Symbols are compressed images of story. Hence they are images of the story-shaped world, which is our world. Symbols are stories, and vice versa. Spufford knows this, too. Like all great stories, Cahokia Jazz is a story about story itself: about the power of story to tell us, to move us (human beings, those solid objects), to show us who we are, or who we might become. Like all great stories, it is itself a symbol. And it works on you with some of the true symbol’s deep power: to discomfit, to reassure, to mystify, to change.