A review by kylegarvey
Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford

adventurous mysterious reflective medium-paced

• Diverse cast of characters? Yes

3.0

Spufford's is a fabulous bigass alt-history-noir cannon spray, but I can't keep straight bare names or occupational identities, let alone the nuances (spilled like snow-globe fake snow, until it settles or seems to settle, when it's shaken up again and loosed into a blizzard cloud) of race or national loyalty or vague culture. Or non-culture, whatever the case, as I think the Mississippian civilization ebbed away, from genocide among other regrettable historical moves, and left behind basically no writing. 

 

We are allowed then to have some 'road not taken' fun -- in big, rollicking, intricately laid goof -- seeing the big tropes (femme fatale, speakeasy, Kirk/Spock bifurcated investigating cops) in rush of radically-swerved historical truth. Whether it's fun jazz squeaks like "Around every streetlamp, a halo of light fog floated within dark fog, grainy, restless" (213) to bitter, Sopranos-like hilarity like "was cherchez la booze, all right" (326), we plumb gray depths we've seen before. In a way I swear is brand new. 

 

We have three races then, takouma (Natives), taklousa (Blacks), takata (whites), with Anopa the lingua franca, in some '20s America where we can loose some Chinatown heaving plot. The Civil War still happened, the KKK (and Birth of a Nation), Prohibition, jazz, everything still sprang up. Just in radically different, odd way. Decidedly Catholic. Alaska's Russian, Mormons agitate for their own state out west, etc., etc. Ok. So I see. Two cops, Phineas Drummond (white) and Joe Barrow (Native but maybe Black too), investigate a murder whose import mounts steadily, suspiciously. 

 

Barrow's sympathetic, jazz-touched, maybe more pensive about the mixture of it all. The religious head of the city, the house of Hashi, elder Sun and his niece the Moon (Couma), approach him (trying to convince him he can be "Thrown-Away Boy", unlikely hero in one of their myths); while his partner, Drummond, pursues some of the safer leads. "The sky is full of smoke but the earth endures" (449). 

 

King's 11/22/63 or Chabon's Yiddish Policemen's Union are alt-history things I've read, and Dick's Man in the High Castle I haven't read but I've seen its TV adaptation and enjoyed the story. Spufford's Cahokia Jazz seems on its whole like Thelma & Louise sort of ( https://letterboxd.com/kylegarvey/film/thelma-louise/ ), or Lethal Weapon ( https://letterboxd.com/kylegarvey/film/lethal-weapon/ )? But pushing toward a simpler religious conclusion, perhaps? 

 

Apologizing for Christianity, whether it's the Catholic kind currently pushing most of Cahokia's takouma society or the Protestant kind from outside, is something Spufford's written about a lot before, I've read. It's probably rarely in an elaborate alt-history way but in the plain way pretending to offer but actually insisting. I don't know. Don't listen to me. Before sentiments unfold in quirky, precise perfection, five times, six, seven, it was stacking up swell, really. Novel? I don't know. 

 

Interesting, I suppose, very interesting in the alt-history way delicately carrying wisdoms about race, identity, commitment, compulsion, forward through a smart cop plot -- but straightening it all toward the end, too much, too many times, cute figures. So many cute figures, so cute.