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The BookBrowse Review
The BookBrowse Review
Published February 12, 2025
ISSN: 1930-0018
The BookBrowse Review
Published February 12, 2025
ISSN: 1930-0018
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Literary Fiction
Historical Fiction
Short Stories
Essays
Thrillers
Romance
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Biography/Memoir
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Science, Health and the Environment
Poetry & Novels in Verse
Thrillers
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
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From "one of the most original minds in contemporary literature" (Nick Hornby) the bestselling and award-winning author of Golden Hill delivers a noirish detective novel set in the 1920s that reimagines how American history would be different if, instead of being decimated, indigenous populations had thrived.
Like his earlier novel Golden Hill, Francis Spufford's Cahokia Jazz inhabits a different version of America, now through the lens of a subtly altered 1920s—a fully imagined world full of fog, cigarette smoke, dubious motives, danger, dark deeds. And in the main character of Joe Barrow, we have a hero of truly epic proportions, a troubled soul to fall in love with as you are swept along by a propulsive and brilliantly twisty plot.
On a snowy night at the end of winter, Barrow and his partner find a body on the roof of a skyscraper. Down below, streetcar bells ring, factory whistles blow, Americans drink in speakeasies and dance to the tempo of modern times. But this is Cahokia, the ancient indigenous city beside the Mississippi living on as a teeming industrial metropolis, filled with people of every race and creed. Among them, peace holds. Just about. But that corpse on the roof will spark a week of drama in which this altered world will spill its secrets and be brought, against a soundtrack of jazz clarinets and wailing streetcars, either to destruction or rebirth.
Excerpt
Cahokia Jazz
With the building dark beneath it, the skylight on the roof of the Land Trust was a pyramid of pure black. Down the smooth black of the glass, something sticky had run, black on black, all the way down into the crust of soft spring snow at Barrow's feet, where it puddled in sunken loops and pools like molasses. On top, a contorted mass was somehow pinned or perched. But the moon was going down on the far side of the Mound, and dawn was an hour and more away. The whole scene on the roof was a clot of shadows, and the wind was full of wet flakes. Along the way, at the small obstacle of a couple of cops on a roof, the snow caked Barrow's coat and got in his eyes, plastered Drummond's back where he'd turned it as a windbreak. Drummond was trying for a flame from his lighter, but even with his hat shielding the flint every spark was instantly quenched.
'Joe, can you go git the patrolman's flashlight?'
'Sure, Phin. Hold on.'
Barrow stepped carefully back towards the little hutch holding the door to the stairs. There was already a mess underfoot. As he expected, the uniform who'd called them in, from the phone down in the lobby, was waiting only a few steps down, on the narrow flight winding round the top of the elevator shaft. Just behind him was the night cleaner who'd found the door unlocked originally. She'd gone out onto the roof, and then run screaming onto Creekside to flag down the patrolman. Neither of them looked what you'd call avid. The cleaner, a heavyset taklousa in her forties, had her mouth clamped shut to hold in shock or nausea. The patroller, only twenty or so, was doing the classic takouma stone face – the set pose for male strength when something bad happened. He'd been out to the skylight too. Not rubberneckers, not spectators. Yet there they still were, keeping close; commanded somehow by the presence of death, compelled to wait attendance where it had visited. It took death repeated over and over, in Barrow's experience, death repeated in quantities too great for meaning, to wear that solemnity away. It took a war. Soldiers could learn to just walk on by in the presence of death, not many other people.
'Gimme your torch, tastanagi.'
'Yessir.'
'Just "Detective".'
'Yes, Detective. Sorry, Detective.'
Perhaps not even twenty, thought Barrow.
'Hey,' he said, 'had the snow started when you went out?'
'Not really. Just a few flakes, maybe?'
'But nothing on the ground.'
'No.'
'Uh-huh.' So, nothing to be learned from footprints; no reason to worry about churning the snow. He turned.
'Officer?' said the cleaner. 'I need to go soon. My babies will be waking up, and my man's on the early shift.'
'You must wait in case there are questions!' the patroller said to her.
'Yeah, stay put,' said Barrow.
He went back out, jiggling the flashlight. It made a tinny rattling sound, from a loose contact. For a moment, the scene remained as it had been, whirling and blind, the snow that had congregated wormily in the dim blue streetlamps down on Creekside Drive blowing up and over the three sister-towers of Water and Land and Power, and spattering the looming bulk of the Mound behind them, and weaving away in lines of flickering grey over the dark immensity of the Plaza beyond. Fifty-seven varieties of dark. Then the switch caught. In the beam, the flakes turned to pearly swimmers. And what had been black on black leapt out into scarlet.
'Whoa,' said Drummond. 'Messy.'
'Yep,' said Barrow. 'Phin, you're standing in it.'
'Shit,' said Drummond, backing, and crouching to swipe the porridge of blood and snow off his black oxfords.
The huddled object on the skylight still didn't make complete sense. A body, of course, and one which had bled out in gouts down the glass; oozed in the other ways death inflicted, judging by the smell reaching his nose through the chill of the snow and the city's usual bouquet of coal-smoke and river. But though at one end it terminated in a pair of ordinary man's legs, dressed in the pants of a dark blue ...
Excerpted from Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford. Copyright © 2024 by Francis Spufford. Excerpted by permission of Scribner. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!
Unless otherwise stated, this discussion guide is reprinted with the permission of Scribner. Any page references refer to a USA edition of the book, usually the trade paperback version, and may vary in other editions.
Here's the big idea of Francis Spufford's Cahokia Jazz: during the Columbian exchange, European colonists, instead of carrying the strain of smallpox that decimated America's Indigenous population, carried a far less virulent strain, Alastrim, that granted immunity upon recovery. A few centuries later, it's 1922, and there remains a visible, mainstream population of Native Americans across the country, marginalized in some places and prosperous in others. Especially prosperous is the ancient city of Cahokia, a hub of industry and culture on the opposite bank of the Mississippi from a tiny town called St. Louis.
The city is majority Indigenous (or takouma in Anopa, Cahokia's lingua franca), with significant populations of Black and white people (taklousa and takata, respectively). Under the watchful eye of the ceremonial-yet-still-formidable takouma monarch, the Man of the Sun, there is something like peace in Cahokia. But the brutal murder of a takata civil servant, staged to look like an Aztec sacrifice, sets off a six-day series of events that pushes the city to its breaking point—and its future may depend upon Joe Barrow, an imposing takouma/taklousa jazz pianist from out of town who works as a homicide detective for the Cahokia police department.
When it comes to alternate history, a compelling scenario only gets you so far. It's impressive to come up with a well-realized setting, one that might have existed had a few metaphorical butterflies not fluttered their wings, but simply describing how this strange new world came to be is not enough: a fascinating history textbook is still a history textbook. What's really impressive is using that setting as a jumping-off point for a cracking great story, the kind of story that turns a bit of bedtime reading into an all-nighter. With Cahokia Jazz, Spufford has done exactly that.
Joe's status as an outsider means he gets exposited to quite often, for the reader's sake as much as his own, but Spufford is careful to explain only what needs explaining. We're told of what's happening elsewhere in America, both good (Reconstruction has been seen through to its conclusion) and bad (there may be a war with Russia over Alaska), but the narrative never loses track of what's really important: the city of Cahokia, its people, and the forces conspiring to tear it apart.
Comparisons to Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union, another alternate history detective novel about a marginalized group with a place of its own, immediately spring to mind. But Chabon's Federal District of Sitka was a bleak place, a tract of slushy Alaskan land populated by despairing, fatalistic Jews preparing for the American government to kick them out forever. Cahokia, by contrast, is a thriving 20th-century metropolis, with streetcars and hot jazz and a hotel designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, and Spufford writes about it with an eye for evocative detail that feels loving even at the city's dirtiest. He describes the fog off the Mississippi as a "billion billion droplets" that were "breathed by the river into the air"; he details "pent-up normality" resuming in the aftermath of a race riot; he writes about a jazz gig at the Algonkian Hotel with such verve you long to travel across time and space to join in.
If I've been vague about the plot, it's only because I want to make sure you go in without preconceived expectations. Suffice it to say, it's an excellent, meat-and-potatoes noir narrative, replete with corrupt cops, manipulative women, powerful men in limousines, and less powerful men in well over their heads. It's colorful, funny, and exciting, with a cynicism that never quite gives way to nihilism. Cahokia is far from a perfect city, it concludes, but it's better than the alternative–a fact to which many of us, in our own world in the year 2024, would attest.
Reviewed by Joe Hoeffner
Joe Barrow, the protagonist of Francis Spufford's Cahokia Jazz, does not speak the titular city's common language, Anopa. He learns bits and pieces of it over the course of the novel, at around the same pace as the reader (heeding the suggestion of his friend Alan Jacobs, Spufford does not include a glossary). We learn the words for Native, Black, and white people (takouma, taklousa, and takata); the word for "warrior," which is the preferred title for Cahokia police officers (tastanagi); the word for "chief," in this context referring to the chief of police (miko).
As Spufford explains in the Notes and Acknowledgements at the end of Cahokia Jazz, Anopa became "something like a Swahili for the whole indigenous population at the continent's center" in the world of the novel, a "synthetic, fully formed language." Essentially, Anopa is what might have happened if Mobilian Jargon, once the lingua franca of Indigenous populations along the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico, had been able to develop more freely.
While Mobilian Jargon was named after the Indigenous tribe French colonists called the Mobile (near the area now known as Mobile, Alabama), the language was actually largely based on the Chickasaw and Choctaw languages, with various loanwords from other tribes (such as the Algonquin further north) and from French, Spanish, and English traders and colonizers. At its peak, Mobilian Jargon was spoken from Georgia to Eastern Texas, and as far north as Missouri (not far from the location of the real Cahokia, an ancient city that now exists as ruins near St. Louis).
Just as Mobilian Jargon lightly modified words from other Indigenous languages, Anopa lightly modifies Mobilian. "Takouma," the Anopa word for Native Americans, literally means "red man"; in Mobilian, that would be "atak hommá." The same goes for "taklousa" and "atak lusa" ("black man") and "takata" and "atak hata" ("white man"). The Man of the Sun, the ceremonial monarch of Cahokia, is referred to as "Hashi," much like Mobilian's word for the sun, "haši." (The Mobilian word for the moon is also "haši"; perhaps to avoid confusion, the Man of the Sun's niece and heir apparent, the Moon, is known by part of her given name, Couma.)
By 1922 in the novel, Anopa has developed into its own language, one that Spufford describes in the Notes and Acknowledgements as "suitable for…modernist poetry." Unfortunately, Mobilian did not get the chance to evolve so fully; Spufford goes on to say that the last people familiar with the jargon were "elderly Native Americans in Louisiana in the 1980s." It's heartening, then, that Mobilian plays such a central role in a book that crackles with life, allowing it, in some form, to thrive once again.
Cahokia Mounds, all that remains of Cahokia, courtesy of Skubasteve834 CC BY-SA 3.0
Filed under Places, Cultures & Identities
By Joe Hoeffner
A Holmes and Watson–style detective duo take the stage in this fantasy with a mystery twist, from the Edgar-winning, multiple Hugo-nominated Robert Jackson Bennett
Winner of the 2017 Costa First Novel Award.
The spectacular first novel from acclaimed nonfiction author Francis Spufford follows the adventures of a mysterious young man in mid-eighteenth century Manhattan, thirty years before the American Revolution, in "a first-class period entertainment" (The Guardian).
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