Spufford, Francis. Cahokia Jazz. Simon and Schuster, New York, Simon and Schuster New York, 2023. F; 3/24.

This long book grew on me steadily and I ended up pretty delighted. Mr. Spufford is 60 and a Cambridge English lit BA, also a practising Christian married to a female clergyman (to stumble over that fraught bit of language). He has gradually switched from nonfiction to fiction and done well at both: prizes, critical acclaim, etc. I did wonder whether his prose style would’ve been better suited to exposition – he kept my disbelief suspended more by what was going on in the story than by poetics although he really wasn’t half bad at that.

Authors of “what-if” stories sometimes seem encouraged to be silly. But reading this one is more like biting into a huge varied real feast than following somebody’s nonsensical counterfactual. This is a noir murder mystery, love triangle story, violent racist stand-off and political clash, drug-addiction saga and mature-man bildungsroman, all pitched in an existing ballpark in the Midwest and with reference to real history. Main character Joe Barrow is physically bigger than life but also a credible self-effacing everyman.

We are in Cahokia, a city in the 1920s across from modern St. Louis that could have existed, if only a lesser form of smallpox (than the one that depopulated American natives) had arrived first. Three groups make up the town: takuoma (natives), taklousa (African-Americans), and takata (Europeans). There is conflict brewing between the natives and a strong Ku Klux Klan. The main religion in town is sun and moon worship and there are a king and princess respectively, Roman Catholicism is also around and there is a strong streak of cultural and criminal atheism that was historically on the rise in the 1920s. So… credible? I didn’t think so at first.

But there’s a quick respite from history as local cops including takuoma orphan Barrow, sidekick of more senior Phineas Drummond are called to the late-night murder of a simple civil servant, possibly ritually disemboweled at the top of one of the public buildings. The 1920s police scene is credible. Whodunit is settled only at the end, but I imagine the complex realistic historical police story would sell by itself to Hollywood on a B level. Right away we are also introduced to the religious leader Man of the Sun: he not entirely credibly spirits Barrow away in his Duesenberg (1920s version of a Bugatti sedan). Barrow later meets the moon princess, while investigating for possible murder witnesses and imagines what it would be like to get to know her. Adopted “lonely boy” is connected with the local royalty.

I tried to download and print the interesting provided map of Cahokia on Kindle but couldn’t get the electronic version on paper. It would’ve been a help as the city is alive with its fog and strong smells of vintage 1920s post-war changes and the action is described in named streets, buildings, and plazas.

Today on the site of Cahokia there exist enormous mounds of earth which have been excavated to reveal the approximately 12^th century remains of a large and quite complex native urban civilization. So adding a bit of credibility to the “what-if” fictional scene that develops after the murder and warming up a certain kind of reader’s interest in what’s happening in Cahokia.

Jazz? Joe Barrow enriched my idea of him – and justified the title – when he reluctantly took to the piano with a combo on stage at a high-class hotel evening. The princess is there along with a nosy lady journalist in town about the murder to appreciate his interpretive keyboard riffs. Two credible armed hand-to-hand fights, a tommygun shootout, confrontations between the Man and a criminal godfather, early crystal meth, a sweet police secretary also in love with Barrow, the climax of rising worries and then certainty of a violent clash in the city centre, and other dramatic events inject ambiguity and carried my attention as the murder, the music, the love interest, the conspiracies, and all the rest of it pulled together following Joe Barrow to the end.

Racism and religious syncretism are handled so gently that my sensitive nose for raw woke and/or zealotry never even twitched. Mr. Spufford wisecracks in his “notes and acknowledgements” that in 2023 Cahokia there’s a very good very tall jazz piano player….

Nothing’s perfect. Critics have been annoyed by the similar-sounding three cultures of people, there is some too-familiar tossing-off of Anopa, a native language really in use today but obviously known to a tiny minority of readers. I found Mr. Spufford’s figures of speech a bit flat especially early in the story. But that didn’t seem to matter as the human and moral plot closed.

The characters aren’t perfect either but that’s a plus. Wound up in their complexity are a lot of secrets and compromises. That’s oddly familiar and because the story is so heavily believable it encourages what scientists would call external validity: this is true everywhere. Great fiction set in Prague, Tokyo, Los Angeles has to be difficult to accomplish even for a writer in love with the cobblestones in the neighbourhoods. But to pull out something as real and memorable as this Cahokia that never existed I think is quite an achievement of the imagination.

As I said this story grows steadily through to its ending. For once I was grateful for a long story not to have to stop reading to make the fun last.

I hope you read it and enjoy it as much as I did.

9.5/9.0