Atmospheric ... Spufford, one of our most powerful writers of wayward historical fiction, sets his book — a hard-boiled crime story — in an America that’s recognizable yet disquietingly not ... Weirder and more austere in tone than Spufford’s preceding works of fiction ... World-building can be a tedious project, and there are stretches, especially early on, where Cahokia Jazz threatens to buckle under the weight of all these details. Fortunately, the other police detective on the roof that night comes to the rescue of this novel and its dark, desperate promise of American redemption ... Spufford clearly has a blast in Cahokia Jazz, summoning up the language and all the traditional tropes of a 1920s hard-boiled tale ... Many of us will recognize our own held-breath bafflement, caught, as we are, on the darkling plain of our own barely believable times.
...an intricate, suspenseful and moving story that rises from the mists of America’s prehistory and morphs into an alternate version of America’s story. Part world building, part detective noir, part savage critique of our country’s (real) history, Spufford builds his creation on the foundations of a real place that grew, thrived and then vanished ... Cahokia Jazz takes on a lot, and its ambitions are huge. Does it work? For this reader, it does. Spufford has a sure grasp of the perverted politics and relentless grind of the wheels of capitalism, circa 1922. His dialogue snaps, and he can riff on just about anything, including Joe’s avocation as a jazz pianist, with authority. There might be a little too much description, and long, learned, expository passages coming out of the mouths of police sergeants. But Spufford, whose acclaimed 2016 novel Golden Hill sent up 18th century Colonial America, keeps his engine running with action and intrigue, romance and suspense, and his sense of place is spellbinding.
Inevitably, a detective noir set in a speculative American province filled with an Indigenous population, and featuring a half-Indigenous detective, will recall Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union—a great book that also trips over its obsessive details. (Perhaps to cushion this comparison, Spufford nods to Chabon’s Sitka early on.) Yet the complex political setup here owes more to James Ellroy’s hyper-stylized Underworld U.S.A. trilogy than to Chabon ... The world of Cahokia is rich and complex, racially, politically and spiritually. Spufford does a nice job with the emotional tug of war between the native Cahokian religion and the superimposed Catholicism. Unfortunately, these details drown the investigation, which is often rendered in a pitter-patter exposition that can make Barrow seem downright naïve. Cahokia Jazz is a novel of dualities, something that is both its triumph and its shortcoming.
Spufford is one of our most interesting and unpredictable writers ... Here, he uses his great skill as a storyteller to create a fictional world that, like another alternative history – Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle – has a great deal to say about contemporary America, particularly the issue of race ... The novel is divided into sections spanning six wintry days, each of them so full of action and information that you have to check to ensure that you haven’t skipped forward in time. How you get on with Cahokia Jazz will depend largely upon how much patience you have for exposition, the extent to which you object to your noirish thriller being interrupted by chunks of expository dialogue. To my mind, Spufford gets away with it: even within the context of a genre that requires the author to carry out so much visible world-building, his flights of imagination and generosity of spirit carry the reader along. Cahokia Jazz joins Robert Harris’s Fatherland and Keith Roberts’s Pavane as a classic of alternative history, further evidence of Spufford’s range and subtlety as a novelist.
The embellishments on the speculative city that Joe explores during his investigation are a source of constant delight ... The novelty is all the more important because so much of the book feels overly, even parodically, familiar ... Mr. Spufford is English and it may be that only an outsider could have dreamed up a vision of America this charming and optimistic.
Cahokia Jazz nods to the hard-boiled prose of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. It rattles through the urban jungle in the manner of a fast-paced dimestore thriller ... An overtly political writer might at this stage be laying the ground for a different breed of drama – a revisionist revengers’ tale, perhaps, in which an alliance of Native Americans and former slaves wrest control from their historic white oppressors. Spufford’s approach is more playful than prescriptive, more akin to that of an expert model engineer. He builds a world and paints the scenery, provides a physical map and useful background information, to the point where the act of creation becomes a story in itself. Cahokia, unavoidably, is a hotbed of racial and cultural tensions. But it primarily serves as an ornate film-noir playground; one that stirs memories of the alternative Alaska that formed the centrepiece of Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union ... But the book’s route, although jolting, is rich with incident, texture and colour. Think of the genre plot as a tour bus; a handy mode of transportation. Spufford rides it through Cahokia and lovingly points out all the sights.
[A] gripping, richly imagined, ultimately shattering new novel ... n Joe Barrow, Spufford has created a deeply sympathetic central character who is much more than he first appears to be, even to himself ... In Spufford’s prose pithiness alternates with beauty, unobtrusively ... a novel about finding one’s place in the world. It is haunting, wholly memorable, and will leave you with an ache.
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 ... 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...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 ... 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.
Spufford’s Cahokia is a complex confection, an extended feat of world-building that aligns his project with a recent vogue for alternative Americas ... Spufford’s novel, alas, is neither quite one thing nor the other. His alternative world is impressive in its intricacy. But it functions, fundamentally, as distracting window-dressing for the police procedural, which is not as gripping as it should be. The puzzles and clues that Barrow follows have a predictable, even YA-ish quality, while noirish details and dialogue can tip from pastiche-y into cheesy ... an interesting experiment from a fascinating, wide-ranging mind, but not, in artistic terms, a total success.
...a rich and fluently imagined alternate history ... Ultimately Cahokia Jazz is most notable for the thought that’s gone into its thought-experiment. It demands the reader’s trust and faith as it unpacks its characters, plot, and ideas, and it invites debate about its choices ... Adding yet another layer, Kroeber is also notable as the father of Ursula K. Le Guin, to whom Cahokia Jazz is dedicated, and as the novel moves into its closing stages, the noir (and Christian) search for belief in a fallen world is married with a distinctly Le Guinian line of questioning: how should a good society be maintained? ... Perhaps Cahokia Jazz’s greatest achievement is the way in which it balances this symbolic potency with the hard reality of a living culture.
If you are an every-word reveller, you will have no problem, and indeed will love this lush, luxuriant book. But if you are a vertical speed king, you may find yourself cursing, constantly turning back to the explanatory note, and eventually making up a mnemonic about what means what ... a gorgeously rich and multilayered story, packed with gunfire, music and superstition ... Cahokia Jazz is enormous fun, and the closest contemporary novel like it is Colson Whitehead’s magnificent The Underground Railroad ... Barrow is a terrific action hero.
[A] thrilling leap into alternative history ... a murder mystery that doesn’t let up ... Like the city and world it depicts, this is a complicated book that offers many layers of pleasure ... Above all, there’s the joy that comes from seeing a profusion of love and care poured into a fully original piece of work.
It can take time to get to grips with theAnopa words, and keep track of how individuals and groups relate to each other, at the same time as following the police procedural. Spufford knows this and tries to keep the reader on board with expositional dialogue and scenes where the detectives write down the chain of events, ostensibly as reports. I found this helpful and, with the novel moving at a swift pace elsewhere, a welcome slowing-down of the action that did not feel clunky ... As a stylist, Spufford is not flashy or self-indulgent but his sentences are full of brio and you can bask in their lyricism even when the story drags ... Cahokia Jazz suggests that he can invigorate any genre he chooses to work in. Its concern with race and identity means that, like both of his previous novels, it speaks as much to our present as to the imagined past in which it is set.
Spufford’s counterfactual narrative is an ingenious backdrop to his first foray into crime noir. He’s entirely convincing about the possibility that Cahokia survived into the 1920s, influenced not by Aztecs but by the Jesuit fathers, who fled north after the fall of Tenochtitlan ... What most gripped me, though, was not the resolution of the murder case, entertaining though that was, but the evolution of jazz-loving, piano-playing Detective Barrow – 'a bum who can’t seem to get it together to decide if he’s a cop or a pianist' – who spends almost as much time figuring out who he is, as he does who killed Frederick Hopper. There is a particularly neat segue back to human sacrifice. It’s a delight of a novel – one that will send those who know Spufford for his fiction scampering to his non-fiction backlist.
The book’s debt to the likes of Raymond Chandler is evident throughout, as Detective Barrow steps into the hallowed role of the untarnished, unvarnished romantic who makes his way doggedly down these mean streets. And on occasion, Spufford’s language equals that of noir masters of yore: 'He had opened the box at the city’s heart, and found it contained a secret, and a dark one, a grim sacrifice, but not a snake or a scorpion, not anything beyond the reach of the hope that every morning upholds hearts and cities. And now he was free to go. The city was done with him.' There’s a bit of a learning curve for the reader, as unfamiliar language and culture weave through the intricately plotted narrative, but Spufford propels the Jazz Age action to a climax that is at once unanticipated and seemingly inevitable.
Spufford has written an astounding homage to noir mysteries. A poignant drama-filled novel that his fans and readers of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian will thoroughly enjoy.
This richly imagined and densely plotted story refreshes the crime genre and acts as a fun house mirror reflection of contemporary attitudes toward race—all set to a thumping jazz age soundtrack. Standing alongside Orson Scott Card’s Alvin Maker series and Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, this is a challenging evocation of an America that never was.
The concept owes a debt to Michael Chabon’s 2007 counterfactual detective yarn, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, but Joe is an original invention, steeped in complex history—a 'Mississippian fusion' of European, American, and Native ideas—and torn over what do for himself, his city, and his culture. A richly entertaining take on the crime story, and a country that might’ve been.
