In his 1953 novel, Bring the Jubilee, Ward Moore imagined an alternative history in which General Lee won the battle of Gettysburg and became the president of a Confederate America. It’s a fine story, although, like many books in the genre, the author is forced to spend an uncomfortable amount of narrative time doling out chunks of information to his reader: setting in place what has changed – and, crucially, what has not – as a result of the nudge given to history. It was a problem that beset Laurent Binet more recently in Civilisations, which imagined what would have happened had the Spanish failed in their attempts to conquer South America. That book was wonderful, but Binet kept having to interrupt the rollicking plot to catch up the reader with the onward march of (alternative) history. It feels like it’s a problem that is baked into the genre itself: if you are going to rearrange the furniture of history, it creates a lot of housekeeping.
This is particularly true if, like Spufford, your alternative history diverges significantly from the world as we know it. Spufford’s “what if” is a fascinating one: he imagines that the variant of smallpox that arrived with European settlers was variola minor, both dramatically less fatal than variola major and conferring immunity on those who contracted it. This virological sleight of hand means that, far from being almost entirely wiped out (it’s estimated that between 90-95% of Indigenous peoples in North America were killed by smallpox and other European diseases), there is a huge and thriving Native American population in the US in 1922, when this novel is set.
