The problem with reviews is that you are reliant upon those who write them. I don’t mean that you have to trust these people, these “reviewers”: you don’t, you can choose to dismiss everything they say. Sometimes, you may read a book precisely because a particular reviewer disliked it (though this, I suppose, is also a form of trust). Rather, I mean something perhaps deeper, perhaps more banal: that, for those of us who rely on or enjoy or simply consume reviews and criticism, we are restricted in our choices by who is writing about what. We are chained to the reading habits of others—and, indeed, those others are often similarly limited by the books to which they have access, those about which they receive notice … and, importantly, those they choose.

How is an audience built up around a text, and why do particular shapes of them coalesce around specific books? This is a mysterious process, and to place too much emphasis on mere marketing is I think to grant too complete an agency to the publicist—and to give too little credit to all those reviewers, many of whom diligently set out to pick around the press notices that sometimes litter their doormats or fill up their inboxes. Of course, within the market, books aim themselves at demographics, and this affects who will write about them. But readers have power, too—and can strive to make active choices about what to read and when to write about those choices.

This is a lengthy preamble to beg forgiveness for writing a review so out of kilter with the audience that has gathered around Cahokia Jazz, Francis Spufford’s latest novel. In fact, for some time I thought I shouldn’t write it at all, that it would be better for the novel to be critiqued by others. But, for better or worse, I’m pretty much a part of this novel’s target audience, or at least the audience that seems to have received the novel with satisfaction; and so perhaps my thoughts might be useful, and even save those who have not yet embraced this novel from doing the work that its audience perhaps should already have done.

Now, I enjoy Spufford’s work. Red Plenty (2010) in particular is a unique and important book, as good a dramatization of scientists-as-utopians as perhaps we have. In reviewing it for Strange Horizons, Adam Roberts noted usefully that “Red Plenty is about the valences of future possibility”—that is, this not-historical-novel was somehow about the ways in which we generate futures. It was typical of Spufford to that date, too, in that it was not even a novel, although it was sort of a fiction: at that point best known for The Child That Books Built (2002), he was until relatively recently a writer of nonfiction. His first proper novel, Golden Hill, did not appear until 2016, and even then it was a sort of nonfiction writer’s bit of fiction: a pastiche, a curling of marginalia at the edges of a social history book. It was also very readable, and its particular trick—its protagonist, it turns out, has only passed as white among the denizens of a pre-revolutionary American seaboard town and is in fact of mixed race and out for restitution—was especially well turned.

Cahokia Jazz arrives to us following Light Perpetual (2021), a second novel that fictionalised a true story of a V-2 bombing. This third novel therefore counts almost as Spufford’s first full fiction: here he isn’t fictionalising anything, isn’t embedded in English culture or history, or relying upon the idioms of a particular place and time (although ultimately the novel cannot avoid replicating many contemporary tropes in its structures, of which more anon); rather, Cahokia Jazz is an alternate history novel, a making-good of that promise to speculative readers of Red Plenty—here is a world created whole. But again, it is one that is read back, placed not in the alternative present and certainly not the valenced future, but in an imagined 1930s. It’s a historical novel of another history that never happened, and I think, in steering so far from safe harbour, Spufford comes unstuck.

But I’m a lone voice in this. Here’s Alex Preston in The Guardian: “further evidence of Spufford’s range and subtlety as a novelist.” Or Mary Ann Gwin at the LA Times: “dazzling.” Clifford Thomson in the TLS found the novel “haunting, wholly memorable,” while Mark Oakley in Church Times considered it “classic and edgy.” The book found itself into the Locus recommended reading list for 2023, and John Self found it “thrilling” in the FT.

Only Ivy Pochoda in The New York Times wavered: “the noir itself,” she said of this detective novel hidden by a Jonbar point, “is hidden under so many layers of ceremonial dress that you may feel as if you are excavating one of the actual Cahokia mounds.” Now, Pochoda’s main criticism in the review is that the novel involves too much “worldbuilding.” Cahokia Jazz is definitely long—it is nigh on 500 pages, and at times, despite an often clever episodic structure, it experiences longueurs, feels its length. In some ways it does so as a streaming TV show does, with detail and discursion, taking its time to linger in places and savour sensations—this is the worldbuilding bit, and as we’ll see in places it is smart and subtle. But at other times, the novel feels like streaming TV sometimes does: like an endless circling, a churning of content to uncertain purpose. So Pochoda’s not wrong; but the “worldbuilding” complaint (“Spufford’s well-imagined world requires constant building and that, alas, smothers the plot”) is maybe a bit too easy, like blaming the lemon for being sour. Of course it is; you should have taken more care with it. This is, after all, an alternate history novel. The worldbuilding is sort of the point—and with it we might create a new, contained world all its own. But.

We might perhaps linger on Pochoda’s particular choice of term for all that “worldbuilding”: “ceremonial dress.” On one level, this is a bit tasteless, since—for those of you that don’t know Cahokia and have therefore missed the clue about this novel in its title—Spufford’s alternative history rests in a different outcome for Indigenous civilisation in North America, in which the titular Mississippian city persists into the twentieth century. To this extent, perhaps you can do without Pochoda’s wordplay. But I wonder if she isn’t slyly tipping us the wink: she knows, too, that there’s a problem here … and that it’s not one you can necessarily get at in a 900-word review for the Gray Lady. There’s something not about how Cahokia Jazz builds its world, but what kind of world it builds, that puzzles the will. And since we’re more than 900 words into this review already, perhaps we ought to reach the point.

To wit: Cahokia Jazz is the story of the city featured in its title, one which now survives only as a set of earthworks just outside St Louis, Missouri, but which once, around the twelfth and thirteenth centuries of the Christian era, had a population of tens of thousands and an extent of several square miles. In Spufford’s alternate history, the Mississippian culture has somehow—and the whys and wherefores of this are kept vague for a long time, about which more shortly—persisted into the twentieth century. Cahokia now sits at the heart of an Indigenous state of a much different Union, one in which the eastern seaboard states seem more or less familiar, with the Midwest more of a patchwork, and the west, including a Republic of Deseret remaining outside of the federal structure, looking decidedly different indeed. The novel opens with a map of this changed continent, in which Alaska remains war-like and Russian, and Canada creeps further south as “British Oregon.” I was immediately reminded of The Man In The High Castle (1962), a novel rich in unintended consequences—and, as it turns out, similarly impressionistic and selective in how it fills in the details of its awkward alternate histories.

Our point-of-view character is Joe Barrow, a mixed-race member of the Cahokia PD, who—alongside his stereotypical Deep Southern white partner, whom he met during service in the First World War and whom he has followed around ever since—is thrown headlong into the novel’s inciting incident: the apparently ritualistic murder of a Caucasian man named Fred Hopper. The corpse is found at the heart of the city, within the plaza of buildings that form Cahokia’s alternative method of public governance, in which the principal structures are known as the Three Sisters: Land, Water and Power. “We don’t have private ownership here,” a character later explains. “Instead, people who need to use the land take our leases, for a certain number of years … And the lease will say, you can do such-and-such things with this land … such-and-such a share of water and, nowadays anyway, to such-and-such a share of electricity” (p. 74). This is one of the nicest parts of the novel’s worldbuilding, which incorporates much of this kind of bureaucratic detail, this building-out of how a Mississippian twentieth century could have panned out: we learn about the ecclesiology of its Catholic Church, about the city’s crime gangs and local politics, its relationship to both Capitol Hill and Wall Street back east. There is a real interest throughout in how these communities work, and this bricolage of administrative elements convinces as a set of systems that interact and intersect.

Of course, the murder threatens to upend all this: Cahokia is a fraught place, sitting at the centre of a fraught union, and a white man being murdered in the very centre of Indigenous power—and in an apparently “Aztec” fashion (it is commonly believed that Cahokia is of Mexican foundation, and much is made of an “obsidian blade”)—rapidly becomes a flash-point that the cops are instructed to snuff out fast. Because this is a noir, you would expect things not to be so simple, and indeed the various agendas and cross-currents Barrow soon comes to encounter paint a generically familiar picture of corruption and decadence. It will surprise few readers that much of what happens in the novel is linked to capitalists’ desire to “overthrow the State Constitution and in particular the clauses of it that write in the collective ownership of the Three Sisters” (p. 235).

Other noir staples also recur: femmes fatales, personal betrayals, speakeasies and mysterious benefactors. Barrow is a reliably unfortunate protagonist, in the mould of Spade and Marlowe: he gets beaten up a lot, he is hopeless with the ladies, he is strangely slow on the uptake for a guy whose business it is to solve crimes. That said, he is also generally likeable, as most innocents abroad in fiction tend to be. He is a frustrated jazz pianist, and the reader longs for him to give up all the gumshoe stuff and just get back to the ivories. When the woman Spufford positions as Barrow’s nice-but-plain alternative offers him a comfortable-but-dull life, you want to smack him when he chooses the impossible-but-exciting alternative to predictably disastrous effects. That everyone around him—the hard-bitten police chief, the dutiful sergeant, the shady industrialist, the go-get-em modern woman—fit so completely into their generic roles only brings into greater relief Barrow’s relative complexity.

But this is where you start to wonder: what’s the book up to? Wither this mash-up of alternative and familiar America, of – in Barrow’s own person – Native and transplant? Now, I am emphatically not referring to the sight of a white English chap writing a novel about Indigenous Americans; you may wish to, and I’d support you in looking askance at it, but also I think this is a debate the novel quite wants to have with us (isn’t its “Indigenous” culture fictional, unrelated to any extant nation today?), and we should sidestep it for now. Let’s talk first about this grafting of the noir aesthetic onto an Indigenous context: what is the benefit? I think the primary purpose is to striate the utopian layers of this vision of a strong Indigenous survival into the twentieth century with the cynicism and even nihilism of a form of detective fiction that sees corruption everywhere. That is, Cahokia Jazz is an alt.history suspicious of the urge to rhapsodise the road not taken. That past might have been different, even have offered better options, the novel seems to say; but it wouldn’t have been perfect. It might not even have been good. Nevertheless, I find it odd that the version of noir that Spufford grafts onto Cahokia here is such a ventriloquising of Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler. I wonder why we aren’t just reading LeAnne Howe or David Treuer, Indigenous writers of crime fiction who have grappled more authentically with how human depravity might interact with lost culture. In Cahokia Jazz, the genre isn’t adapted to allow for Indigenous perspectives; the traffic goes in the other direction.

A third of the way through, we learn why this world is like it is: the earliest Europeans brought not the most virulent form of smallpox during the “Columbian exchange” (p. 495), but the least, and thus—inoculated by chance—more Indigenous people survived the arrival of white men, to resettle a Cahokia which in our own world was abandoned by 1400. We’re told this in a lecture, of all things, by a white man, of all people. In fact, it is the white man to whose offspring the novel is dedicated (and “Professor Kroeber’s daughter” is a bit of a cute circumlocution when you mean, y’know, Ursula Le Guin). This man, Alfred Kroeber is in some ways the central figure in this novel, in this version of history as in ours an expert anthropologist with a particular specialism in Native American cultures. He explains the world to us. There is, Kroeber declaims, no “Aztecean” influence on Cahokia, none of the ancient inheritance of civilisation that in this history is so often assumed; rather, the city’s language, Anopa, began as “an interlingual jargon for the riverlands … Muskogean, Creek, Chickasaw, Cherokee” and so on (p. 177). But wait: “there is one historically attested mechanism by which Mexico influenced Cahokia. It is the Society of Jesus” (p. 177).

And so Cahokia Jazz proves surprisingly uninterested in the history of its own alternative past. It relegates a partial reveal to a single sentence in a literal lecture delivered nearly 200 pages in. A fuller curtain-pull appears only in an Author’s Note, of all things. The effect of this coyness is to place the novel’s spotlight not on the breadth of its posited Indigenous past, but on a specific element of it—and that element is its interaction with the Jesuits. I said that Spufford distrusts utopias, and I think this is true in the informal sense of the word—as an imagined place of wonder. But in the formal sense of the word—as a no-place in which to conduct thought experiments—I think he’s rather fond of them. The Jonbar point that leads to this Cahokia is so under-emphasised because it isn’t at all the point. Cahokia exists because Spufford needs it to: he isn’t exploring Indigenous history at all; rather, he is using it to make an argument with it. “What if the United States had instead been maybe a bit like Canada or New Zealand,” he asks in an interview with Slate, “in which there had continued to be an Indigenous presence that was just too big to be pushed to the margins like that? What would it be like?” Now, the premise of this what-if does not entirely reflect my understanding of the colonial histories of either Canada or New Zealand; but, either way, note the angle of the focus: on the effect of Indigenous survival upon the US.

Alfred Kroeber was a champion of syncretism, a form of anthropology which studies mixing (we recall that Barrow is of mixed heritage, part “Native” and part African-American). Spufford lets him evangelise: “syncretism is not a defect,” Kroeber insists in these pages, “is not an impurity. It is an inarguable sign of evolutionary success” (p. 176). Reader, I don’t wish to argue for purity. But I am also suspicious of the Whig interpretation of history, evolutionary or otherwise. All does not proceed towards ever-greater achievements; mere mixing is not an achievement in and of itself. To take real-life North American examples, the Voodoo of Haiti, the music of New Orleans, or the cuisine of the Gullah people are all syncretisms born of the historical horror of the slave trade. Whatever joys or resistances we find within them, we should as a rule be wary—at least sensitive—of how we extol those undoubted virtues. Colonialism’s long tail should be understood not only—or inevitably—as a process of accommodation, however successful, with uneven and unequal interactions. Yet what the novel calls the “strange miscellany of Cahokia” (p. 259) serves to underscore Kroeber’s positivity: the Irish who find a happier home in Cahokia than in New York in the nineteenth century join forces with Indigenous troops to repel an attack by Robert E. Lee, in the employ of a Union never in this history troubled by the Confederacy; Cahokia is an equal part of that Union, sending senators and congressmen to Washington DC, but also retaining as we have seen its unique land-sharing arrangements; and, to return to the Jesuits, religion—above all, religion—is just better here: that is, the quasi-feudal Indigenous rulers of Cahokia, the Sun and Moon, male and female, include on the former side not just an inheritor of Native American mythology and symbology but a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church:

“Father Villanova got Cahokia to fuse together Christ’s presence in the sacrament with their sacred flame. He thought of it, of course, as a kind of conceptual bridge they might cross over to thew truth—his truth, that is—after which they could leave the solar stuff behind. But they are stubborn souls, as you have seen, and the kept both.” (p. 359)

That’s Kroeber again, of course. But it’s not just through his eyes that Christ is seen. Barrow, too—a man of at best inactive faith—at one point stumbles into a church: “he passed under a cruxifix. Just for a flash, a takouma Christ looked down at him” (p. 349). Takouma is the Anopian world for “Indigenous”: in this world, Spufford can posit Christ as Native. He can also express “Native” as a different set of characteristics, a designation altered across the centuries into something other than what it was. There also exist the words takata and taklousa, for European and African, and these allow Spufford an awful lot of room to discuss race while avoiding our own words—and therefore our own identities. The Ku Klux Klan are here, but they read more like the slapstick satire of O Brother Where Art Thou (2000)—in which the Klan is storybook sinister, but also explicitly silly and ultimately easily defeated—than anything more systemic or threatening. And these particular white-hooded Keystone Kops of course fight for takata men, not white men. Nomenclature matters—naming things has effects. Spufford knows this, and his thought experiment depends on it.

Now, naturally, all of this also has its productive side. Freeing the novel from our own world’s freighted and difficult racial politics enables Cahokia Jazz to create other—yes, more syncretic—identities that can help illumine and challenge our understandings of ethnicity. It is hard not to be inspired by the sights and sounds of Cahokia—all of which Spufford captures with a real sentence-level mastery, and which enable the reader’s transportation to a different place which, from our own perspectives, feels hopeful and elegiac. Spaces for coexistence are present in Cahokia which are not available in our own world; other, less rapacious, Americas are wrestled into contested being, “words from Anopa … in the air, along with stray phrases of Louisiana French, railroad slang in Navajo from the Dinetah and horsebreakers’ terms in Commanche” (p. 17). Cahokia is indeed like the jazz Barrow plays with his old band as they pass through town: “one of those shared trances where competition and co-operation worked so close they couldn’t be distinguished” (p. 188).

But again: to what end? Here we should read some prior Spufford. In his defense of his Christianity, Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense (2012), Spufford makes the case that religion is about feeling—that its truth can be found in its capacity to provide successful interpretative frames for human passions. “And so it makes emotional sense to proceed as if He’s there; to dare the conditional,” the book concludes. “And not timid death-fearing emotional sense, or cowering craven master-seeking sense, or censorious holier-than-thou sense, either. Hopeful sense. Realistic sense. Battered-about-but-still-trying sense” (p. 240). Attentive readers will see Barrow in this: hopeful, realistic, battered. They’d be right to. Here’s Spufford in Church Times, on Cahokia Jazz: “As well as being pulp fiction and speculative history, it’s also intended to be doing something theological,” he says of the novel. “Whether I set out to, consciously or not, I seem to be endlessly tracing over the invisible shape of the gospel underneath the paper I’m writing on, telling sin-and-redemption stories, because that’s just the shape I perceive reality to be.”

Now reader, this is fine. It is good, even: all novelists are threading the realities they perceive into the fictions that make sense of them. The Chronicles of Narnia is fine. Marilynne Robinson is quite good actually. But again I wonder, just as we did about the perhaps more effable question of generic crime fiction: does the context within which Spufford chose to tell his story really bear it? Should it?

In her trenchant and beautiful As We Have Always Done (2017), the Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson makes an impassioned plea for the role cultural production must play in Indigenous resurgence. “We desperately need,” she writes, “a new generation of thinkers … that can think within our philosophies and enact those philosophies as a living and breathing imposition to colonialism” (p. 160). In an interview about historical trauma found in Sara Sinclair’s How We Got Home, the Chickasaw scholar Johnna James suggests how to tackle the wounds of the past: “it’s community driven, and that we’re healing together generationally” (p. 305). Or, in The Remembered Earth (1979), the Laguna and Sioux writer Paula Gunn Allen long ago declared: “The land is not … the place … where we act out the drama of our isolate destinies. It is not a means of survival, a setting for our affairs, a resource on which we draw in order to keep our own act functioning” (p. 191). That is, the Indigenous world is not set-dressing.

Again, I don’t write to suggest that Spufford should not write of Indigenous matters. I write to suggest he has not done so well. There are moments when he manages—when he navigates with aplomb the twin poles that Sean Teuton has, in his Very Short Introduction to Native American Literature (2018), helpfully if, given the books’s concision, necessarily reductively glosses as “the ‘novel of resistance’ and the ‘novel of assimilation’” (p. 85): Cahokia’s polyglot persistence indeed navigates a middle way. Elsewhere, there are moments when an Indigenous person is shown refusing “to speak the invader’s language” (p. 91), or in which “the great unspoken principle of American history … that, if it’s worth having, the red man shall not be allowed to keep it” is detailed (p. 234). But these are asides, not the focus, which always remains Kroeber’s vision of syncretic endeavour. And that focus pulls the novel away from its better angels of hope and revival inevitably towards— because it sits unavoidably in the codes that have built and been built by these tropes especially—the Tragic Native and the Vanishing Native. There’s a sense in which Cahokia’s Indigeneity (bear with me) is just disappearing at a slower pace than that at which our own world’s varieties suffered: “We have to win every time,” sighs the Sun about the endless attacks of white men on his city. “They only have to win once” (p. 433). As we’ve seen, the novel is aware enough of these pitfalls to build ways in which it might forgive itself: is Barrow not mixed race, is his white partner not untrustworthy, do the Sun and the Moon not end the novel in command of Cahokia? They do. But the villain of the piece is still rebuked with the language of the eastern seaboard, undone with the simple words: “I’ll see you in bankruptcy court” (p. 432). The Sun (who is also, inevitably, known as the Man) then announces: “And tomorrow is the Annunciation. Tomorrow the angel tells the virgin that hope will be born in her” (p. 434). Barrow mumbles, “Whatever,” but the novel’s studied ambivalence cannot hide the shape of its fundamental framework. And it’s not Cahokian.

What might have been, what other alternative realities inflected with Indigenous culture and history might we have? The problem is not that Rebecca Roanhorse’s Trail of Lightning (2018) is more consistently imagined (though it is), or Darcie Little Badger’s Elatsoe (2020) more authentically emotive (though, yeah, it is). It is that the focus of Cahokia Jazz isn’t ultimately the people who live in—who are—its setting. The novel is as we’ve seen instead most acutely interested in abstractions: theology and syncretism, polities and race. This is why the details of its history could not be fitted into the fabric of the story “without giving Detective Barrow a long, plot-stopping conversation … about immunology” (p. 495): it’s not shaped around that stuff. Now, it has interesting things to say about all those other things, and its no-place serves its exploratory purpose exceedingly well. We learn a lot about syncretic religion and multicultural federalism. But Cahokians’ past, present, and potential futures by contrast emerge as only a partially-turned (albeit fitfully evocative) setting in which to explore these themes: all those tribal masks and rituals we spot between the cracks of the story sometimes feel like an Old West town on a Hollywood parking lot, enticingly convincing from many angles, but a little more unsatisfying from a few. Yet Cahokia is not just a setting, however the novel seeks to use it as such, and to treat it in this way creates faultlines that the novel cannot, for all its attempts to do so, buttress itself against. The particularities of the very history to which Spufford’s offers an alternative demand rather more of us. They have, in the earthworks of Cahokia as elsewhere, left a mark it is unwise to ignore. There are those among us who cannot.

And perhaps here we return to the question of audiences, and who might—or will—read this novel. In The Wall Street Journal, Sam Sacks focuses on all the things that Cahokia Jazz does well: “Mr. Spufford is English,” he writes, “and it may be that only an outsider could have dreamed up a vision of America this charming and optimistic.” But in the very same piece, he reads another novel: Wandering Stars (2023), by the Cheyenne and Arapaho writer Tommy Orange. “Mr. Orange’s strengths are his sincerity and conviction,” Sacks concludes, “but Wandering Stars is more persuasive as a diagnosis than a developed work of fiction.” This comparison, these axes of appreciation, are inapposite and unfortunate. None of that is Spufford’s fault. But his novel has its audience; and it has not so far seemed to include the people whose history it rewrites. Their critical voice has not been raised; the silence, it seems to me, is significant.