Available:*
Library | Material Type | Item Barcode | Shelf Number | Status |
---|---|---|---|---|
Searching... Avon-Washington Township Public Library | Adult Fiction Book Hardback | 120791003125735 | F SPU | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
Named a Best Book of the Year by The Guardian and The Financial Times
From "one of the most original minds in contemporary literature" (Nick Hornby) the bestselling and award-winning author of Golden Hill delivers a noirish detective novel set in the 1920s that reimagines how American history would be different if, instead of being decimated, indigenous populations had thrived.
Like his earlier novel Golden Hill , Francis Spufford's Cahokia Jazz inhabits a different version of America, now through the lens of a subtly altered 1920s--a fully imagined world full of fog, cigarette smoke, dubious motives, danger, dark deeds. And in the main character of Joe Barrow, we have a hero of truly epic proportions, a troubled soul to fall in love with as you are swept along by a propulsive and brilliantly twisty plot.
On a snowy night at the end of winter, Barrow and his partner find a body on the roof of a skyscraper. Down below, streetcar bells ring, factory whistles blow, Americans drink in speakeasies and dance to the tempo of modern times. But this is Cahokia, the ancient indigenous city beside the Mississippi living on as a teeming industrial metropolis, filled with people of every race and creed. Among them, peace holds. Just about. But that corpse on the roof will spark a week of drama in which this altered world will spill its secrets and be brought, against a soundtrack of jazz clarinets and wailing streetcars, either to destruction or rebirth.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Spufford (Light Perpetual) sets his clever latest in an alternate America where the Indigenous population wasn't decimated by the European-borne smallpox epidemic in the 16th century. The resulting change is best exemplified by the city of Cahokia in 1922, where Indigenous people rule hereditarily and are integrated with white and Black populations. Det. Joe Barrow and his corrupt white partner, Phineas Drummond, are called to the rooftop of the Land Trust building, where a dead body has been discovered, eviscerated and missing its heart. Early indications point to an Aztec ritual sacrifice. But the two detectives soon find a link to the local KKK, whose goal is to rid the city of Indigenous rule. Barrow quickly realizes he is in over his head trying to expose a conspiracy that involves a German American bootlegger, a munitions tycoon, an Indigenous femme fatale, and maybe even the Cahokia PD. 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. (Feb.)
Guardian Review
Francis Spufford's fabulous third novel is a piece of pulp fiction disguised as speculative history, or possibly vice versa: the tale plays both sides and switches lanes in a blur. It is set in an alternative 1920s America that is recognisable at the edges and unfamiliar at its core, centred on a First Nations people who have avoided the worst effects of manifest destiny to maintain a toehold of power in the febrile midwest. Where Golden Hill, Spufford's riotous 2016 bestseller, took its lead from the writings of Henry and Sarah Fielding to paint a portrait of nascent 18th-century New York, 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. Every good detective story is at heart a licence to roam - an excuse to kick open doors and interview all the suspects. So it is with Cahokia Jazz, which is at least as interested in the investigation of its constructed metropolis as it is in solving the murder of lowly, luckless Fred Hopper, who is found dead on a roof with his heart torn from his chest. The evidence suggests a ritual killing. Suspicion immediately falls on the Indigenous community. But Hopper, in addition to his day job as a clerk, was embroiled with the Ku Klux Klan and in debt to a bootlegger, and his death quickly points to a wider political conspiracy. Spufford's invented city - built around the true-life Cahokia Mounds, near a village called St Louis - is a place of blind alleys and dark corners. It's thick with mystery and in thrall to arcane tribal lore. The majority First Nations population holds sway but its position is tenuous: this utopia is revealed to be a tottering house of cards. Spufford's city is a place of blind alleys and dark corners - it's thick with mystery and in thrall to arcane tribal lore Our tour guide and proxy is headstrong, burly Joe Barrow, a mixed-race police detective who was raised as an orphan at a boys' home in Nebraska. Barrow is conveniently new to Cahokia, still learning the ropes, and so it is via his dogged progress that Spufford draws his picture of a complex "mongrel city" in which fiction is grounded in historical fact. It's March 1922, which means that Warren Harding is president, The Birth of a Nation is the KKK's favourite film and Model-T Fords have the run of the road. But the US is here fighting Russia for control of Alaska while the "Mississippi Renaissance" plays as a kind of reverse Great Migration, funnelling African American factory workers back below the Mason-Dixon line. Reconstruction, it's clear, hasn't bitten so fiercely in these United States, although the result is not so much a melting pot as an unstable pie chart of red, white and black influence. Spufford refers to these factions, respectively, as the takouma, takata and taklousa races. Officially, Barrow is working for the takata-dominated police department, but his physical appearance betrays his takouma origins and he finds himself increasingly beguiled by Cahokia's First Nations leaders. 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. Barrow (a headstrong romantic; your classic noir archetype) is fascinated by what he describes as "the city's secret self", suspecting that each neighbourhood hides a secret and every resident wears a mask. The detective, for his part, is as compromised and entangled as anyone else. He's moonlighting as a jazz pianist and toiling to protect a wayward, rackety fellow officer. He's hopelessly in love with a takouma princess and unwilling to believe that she might be implicated in the crime. Cahokia Jazz similarly has its hands full, gamely juggling exposition with action, the conjuring of a world with the demands of a machine-tooled murder mystery. Gears grind and wheels spin. Headlamps light the crime scene; pennies drop with a clunk. 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.
Kirkus Review
A brutal murder threatens to set off a race war in alternative-history Illinois. In reality, Cahokia was an ancient Native American settlement across the Mississippi River from what's now St. Louis. In Spufford's cleverly conceived, well-made police procedural, it's the hub of a thriving Native-led U.S. state in 1922. Native leadership there is stubbornly opposed by local whites, and the Klan is ascendant. So the murder of a white man on the roof of a downtown building, made to look like an Aztec sacrifice, is a powder keg. Was the killing committed by Natives pushing back against prejudice, or whites stirring tensions to stage a government overthrow? Joe Barrow, a Cahokia police detective investigating the case, is quickly enmeshed not just in the murder but in the politics of a city on edge. (A country, too: Mormons are agitating for their own state out west, and tensions have flared on the border of Alaska, still Russian territory.) Spufford has cleverly thought through all the Risk-board elements of this setup, from Cahokia's industries, to the intersection of Native folkways and Catholicism, to the city's various ethnic enclaves. (A lengthy afterword delivers a plausible case for its creation.) But at heart the novel is a straightforward, smart noir, with Joe torn among his police duties, his sideline as a talented piano player at a local club, an erratic white detective partner, a budding romance, and his own grim upbringing in an orphanage. 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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
A grisly murder exposes the seaminess and the fragility of an imagined 1920s metropolis defined by its large and thriving Indigenous population, the takouma. When an exsanguinated body turns up on a rooftop with flakes of obsidian in its open chest cavity, police detectives Drummond and Barrow chase leads in grim tenements and smoky speakeasies, mostly on the takouma side of town. Reporters pry, the mayor barks, the Ku Klux Klan agitates ominously. Senior takouma leadership--the aristocratic Man of the Sun and his elegant, world-weary niece, the Moon--hint at deep secrets going back to the days of the takouma's first contact with European Jesuits. But for Barrow, himself a Native of unknown ancestry, the case becomes increasingly personal. Spufford, who reimagined Old Manhattan so vividly in Golden Hill (2017), riffs on familiar hard-boiled types (the corrupt cop, the femme fatale) and keeps the plot brisk and violent. But the tune Spufford plays is nothing less than history of an alternative North America, and with his exuberant world building he invites us to consider the notes not played. What if the ancient Mississippi Valley civilization never waned? What if "old-world" smallpox hadn't been so deadly? The outcome, suggests Spufford, might be a society just as diverse and dissonant as our own.
Library Journal Review
This gritty noir murder mystery by Spufford (Light Perpetual) will hook readers with its fully realized tableau of an alternative history where the Indigenous populations in North America thrive rather than being decimated after encountering colonial forces. Realistically envisioned characters populate the pages, while the historical 1920s are on full display. Jazz, Prohibition, and political corruption are tightly and vividly interwoven with the subtle changes to society and culture that such an alternative trajectory may have produced. The Mississippian cultural capital of Cahokia is a flourishing city-state within the United Sates and is the gateway to the West. However, there are tensions behind the scenes in this metropolitan city, and one murder may undo centuries of progress. When Cahokia police detective Joe Barrow and his partner are called to a rooftop crime scene, little do they realize how this case will upend their lives and push them, and their city, on a path leading to either redemption or destruction. VERDICT 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.--Laura Hiatt