Cahokia Jazz

The City That Survived

The premise of Cahokia Jazz rests on a counterfactual: what if the great pre-Columbian city of Cahokia — the largest urban center in pre-contact North America, located near what is now St. Louis, at its peak home to more people than contemporary London — had not collapsed before European contact? What if Indigenous civilization had survived, adapted, and existed alongside the settler cultures that arrived in the centuries after 1492?

Francis Spufford’s answer produces one of the most extraordinary world-building achievements in recent alternate history fiction. The Cahokia of his 1920s is a city that has negotiated its survival through centuries of adaptation — incorporating jazz, automobiles, art deco architecture, and the specific social tensions of an American interwar city while maintaining its Indigenous political and spiritual structures. It is neither a fantasy of unchanged pre-contact culture nor a simple settler city that happens to have Indigenous people in it. It is something genuinely imagined: a city that has made choices across centuries, paying the costs those choices required, and arrived at an unstable present that the novel’s murder mystery will destabilize.

The Detective

Joe Barrow is a detective with the Cahokia Police Department — a man of mixed ancestry (Indigenous Cahokian and African American) whose position at the intersection of the city’s racial communities makes him useful to power and vulnerable to everyone. When a body is found in a ritualistic state — a murder that carries the markers of Cahokian spiritual practice, committed in circumstances that suggest either a genuine practitioner or someone trying to frame one — Barrow is assigned to investigate.

Barrow is a recognizable figure from American noir fiction: the investigator whose professional function requires him to move between worlds that prefer not to be visible to each other, whose personal history is a site of contested loyalties, whose competence is deployed in service of institutions he only partly trusts. What is unusual about Barrow is the specific form his position takes in this alternate world. The racial politics of Cahokia are genuinely different from anything in our own history — Indigenous sovereignty has survived in a different form, the dynamics of race and power have been shaped by a different sequence of events — and Barrow navigates them with the attentiveness of a man who has learned that the same gesture can mean different things to different communities.

The Jazz Atmosphere

Spufford is a British writer whose previous fiction (Golden Hill, Light Perpetual) has demonstrated a gift for American vernacular and historical texture, and Cahokia Jazz deploys that gift in a setting that is explicitly musical. Jazz — the form that emerged from the meeting of African American tradition, New Orleans geography, and the specific pressures of American racism — is reimagined here in a city where the cultural mixing that produced it happened under different conditions.

The jazz of Cahokia sounds, to Barrow’s ear and through his ear to the reader, like our jazz and unlike it — recognizable in structure, different in inflection, the product of a different history of contact and survival. Spufford conveys this through description that is precise about musical form without being technical in a way that excludes non-musicians, and the result is an atmosphere in which the novel’s political tensions are audible as well as visible.

The Political Stakes

The murder investigation reveals, as such investigations tend to do in literary noir, a conflict that the murder was symptom rather than cause. The ritual elements of the crime make it a flashpoint for Cahokia’s ongoing tensions between its Indigenous governance structures and the settler communities that coexist within and alongside the city. Both communities have reasons to use the murder for their own political purposes; Barrow’s investigation threatens the stability that both have invested in maintaining.

What makes Cahokia Jazz distinctive in its handling of these tensions is the care with which Spufford renders the perspectives of characters on multiple sides of the political conflict — not rendering them equivalent (some positions are clearly more defensible than others) but rendering them comprehensible, arising from histories and interests that make sense even when their consequences are harmful.

The novel is explicitly engaged with questions about survival — what it costs, what compromises it requires, who has the right to judge those compromises from outside. Barrow’s own position as a man of mixed ancestry, navigating between communities that both claim him and both regard him with some suspicion, embodies these questions in personal terms.

Spufford’s Prose

One reason Cahokia Jazz is receiving significant attention is the quality of Spufford’s sentence-level writing. His prose is not the efficient prose of genre fiction or the deliberately plain prose of contemporary literary minimalism — it is elaborate, rhythmically complex, alert to connotation and sound, and demanding. The demands are rewarded; Spufford’s sentences carry information that simpler sentences could not, and the texture of the world he builds is inseparable from the texture of his prose.

This density is also the novel’s main barrier to casual readership. Cahokia Jazz is not a book that rewards impatient reading. The mystery plot provides narrative momentum, but the reader who is following only the mystery will miss what the novel is actually about, which is more complex and more interesting than the solution to any individual crime.

An Achievement in Alternate History

The best alternate history fiction uses its counterfactual premise to illuminate something about actual history — to reveal the contingency of what did happen by imagining what could have. Cahokia Jazz does this with particular success. By imagining a world where Cahokia survived, Spufford illuminates the world where it didn’t — the specific choices and accidents and violences that produced the actual history of Indigenous America, visible in sharper relief when set against a history where they went differently.

This is ambitious in the way that only the best literary fiction is ambitious: it uses the pleasures of narrative (mystery, atmosphere, character) to pursue an intellectual purpose that the pleasures serve rather than merely decorate.

Our rating: 4.2/5 — One of the most ambitious and fully realized works of alternate history fiction in recent memory. Dense, richly atmospheric, and intellectually serious about race and power — Spufford’s Cahokia is an extraordinary creation.