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

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.”

Spufford is 59 and Cahokia Jazz is only his third novel: he has previously enjoyed an acclaimed career as a magpie writer of serious non-fiction. Yet in a few short years, he’s established himself as one of our most exhilaratingly unpredictable novelists, taking vertiginous leaps with form and conceit to imagine alternative versions of history in order that we might see our present moment more clearly. Golden Hill was a picaresque freewheeling romp through an 18th-century New York that paid inventive homage to the literature of the period and won the Costa Book Award for First Novel in 2017 – not bad for a 52-year-old. His luminously lovely 2021 novel Light Perpetual, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize – and ought to have won a spot on that year’s shortlist – imagined how the lives of five children might have played out had they survived the deadly, real-life V2 attack on a south London Woolworths in 1941, and combined acutely observed social history with numinous metaphysics. With Cahokia Jazz, he employs parallel realities as a way of probing whether history itself is necessarily predetermined or contingent. It’s an elegant philosophical inquiry as much as a swashbuckling thought experiment.

“One of the useful things about counterfactual storytelling is that it stops you from taking for granted the apparent inevitabilities of your own history,” he says. “One of the things I was trying to do in the novel is to say that the apparently immovable outlines of American racial tensions are themselves a product of history. I wanted to suggest that there is a degree of accident there. By remixing history the way I do, you can posit the idea that America might have had a vast Native American population that couldn’t be pushed to the margins on reservations but which had to be reckoned with. You would have had different relationships between all the different ethnicities in early 20th-century America, and yeah, different problems. There is also a faint utopian promise to this idea. It lets you go, ‘is this really the best we can do? Can we perhaps do better?’”

And of course, by making things up, it paradoxically allows him to ask these very real questions in the first place. Spufford, as he freely admits, is a white middle-class Englishman, living a continent, a century and an entire culture away from Mississippi in 1922. Had he written a straight novel about race and America, he inevitably would have found himself horribly bogged down in very fraught and decidedly 21st-century issues of authenticity, appropriation and representation.

“Even if you were to put aside authenticity, and the question of who gets to tell which story, which you can’t, you are still faced with the problem, as the author, of not being some ideal biracial Leo Tolstoy,” he says. “Where would you need to stand in order to tell any kind of perceptive story about the tragedies of American history if you weren’t working from within it? It’s not only that I couldn’t do it, I’m not sure any writer could do it. Whereas if you look at the subject from an alternative perspective, the loss of real history paradoxically frees you up to think about the causes of events. It’s a form of liberation.”

All of which sounds like a manifesto for the creative freedom of the novel form itself. “Exactly. And there is a necessary freedom in making stuff up, which should not be tested as if the proof of its adequacy is whether it’s a fully accurate documentary. Because fiction can never be a fully accurate documentary. But it can be many other things. I’m on my high horse here, but the test of imaginative writing is breadth of sympathy and generosity of understanding. The test of fiction is how well it imagines something. And I hope with this novel, for all its noirish genre, is in its way also doing bits of imagining that are in their way bold and generous.”

Spufford speaks with such contagious donnish enthusiasm, it makes you wish you were a student on the MA class in creative writing he teaches at Goldsmith’s University. He is easy-going and charming, and fiercely erudite and clever: when I imply Cahokia Jazz brilliantly runs counter to the dominant strain of social realism in English literature, he immediately takes me to task. “We are the nation that invented the Gothic!” he says. “We have Mary Shelley! Angela Carter! Virginia Woolf! Yes, you get the bedsit realism of Philip Larkin but a lot of English literature is intentionally trying to escape the misery of that.”

His novels certainly do: he seems to have had as much pleasure writing Cahokia Jazz as it is to gobble down. I venture that novels that unashamedly set out to delight the reader are a vanishing species in the rarified world of literary fiction. “If there is a fear of [novels that give pleasure], then it’s mistaken, because it misunderstands what pleasure is,” he says. “Pleasure doesn’t have to be frivolous or light – you can get it from tragedy and sorrow just as much as you can from the well-crafted sentence. I wrote this novel during lockdown, and I deliberately intended it to entertain. So, it has the feel of a 1930s black and white Hollywood film, it’s got screwball comedy, it’s got lots of Sturm und Drang. All the things I enjoy. Basically, I became my own test subject.”

He is married to the canon of Ely, Jessica Martin, and is both open and private about his faith. I suggest few novelists dare to write directly about their Christian faith in their novels, with perhaps the exception of the American novelist Marilynne Robinson.

“I am incapable of writing novels that stand outside my sense of how the world works, and faith is an inevitable part of that picture,” he says. “But how you manifest faith creatively is the key artistic question and one thing you don’t do, obviously, is write propaganda or write novels only for people who explicitly share your outlook. On the other hand, there are things that crop up without me realising. I tend to write redemption stories, for example. I do seem also to always get a church service scene into my novels somehow or other. Light Perpetual has a Pentecostal service. Near the end of Cahokia Jazz, there is a Latin mass. Now I’ve noticed this pattern I’m going to keep doing it.”

This suggests he has abandoned nonfiction for a while yet. “There are a couple of non-fiction books I’d like to get round to writing at some point,” he says. “But the queue of novels waiting to be written in my head is not showing any signs of getting smaller.” To which one can only say: hurrah for that.

‘Cahokia Jazz’ is out now, published by Faber