Novelist Francis Spufford on remixing history in new novel Cahokia Jazz: ‘My inner Napoleon definitely came out’

He went to the 18th century with prize-winning debut ‘Golden Hill’ and brought London Blitz victims back to life in ‘Light Perpetual’. Now Francis Spufford is reimagining the birth of America in ‘Cahokia Jazz’. He talks to Claire Allfree about the ‘liberation’ of rewriting the past

Francis Spufford’s new novel focuses on two gumshoe detectives (Antonio Olmos)

What if America’s indigenous population had not been decimated following the arrival of European settlers in the 17th century? What if they had not succumbed in vast numbers to the smallpox and other viruses that the Europeans brought in their wake, and instead thrived and grew? What if it was the white settlers who ended up as powerless and marginalised? It’s a question that so intrigued the novelist Francis Spufford, he wrote a novel imagining precisely that alternative scenario. “‘What if’ statements about the world are such a useful way of exploring how the world actually is,” he says with a hint of glee, sitting wearing his trademark Cossack-style hat in his house in Cambridge, from which he is talking to me over Zoom. “They let you step outside the real, in order to ask ‘why this and not that?’”

Spufford certainly has enormous fun asking “why this and not that” in the excellent whirligig Cahokia Jazz, which is set in the long-lost ancient Native American city of Cahokia in 1922. Jazz is in the air, Native Americans (known as takouma in the book) are in charge, and the city’s mixed population lives in a state of relatively easy-going truce. Until, that is, the discovery of a dead white man laid out with bloody ritualistic spectacle on the top of a public building in the snow threatens to tear apart the entente.

A couple of gumshoe detectives, one a white veteran of the First World War, another an adopted mixed-race Native American who doesn’t speak the fictional takouma language of Apona, are tasked with unravelling the victim’s links with an emergent Ku Klux Klan across six action-packed days. The result is both a fast-moving noirish procedural and a terrific feat of world-building, each page summoning vistas of a “fog-bound metropolis” heaving with speakeasies and shadowy political factions. In creating it and the city’s rich back story, Spufford freely admits to a degree of “writerly megalomania”. “If you enjoy composing a setting in a novel, then why not compose a city’s entire timeline?” he says. “My inner Napoleon definitely came out in the writing of this.”