The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

It’s a brilliant conceit, and from this point forwards, the book takes on a visionary new life. Cora and Caesar are led through a trapdoor and down to a subterranean platform where rails stretch away into darkness. For Whitehead has taken that historical metaphor – the network of abolitionists who helped ferry slaves out of the south – and made it into a glistening, steampunk reality. And here is the spark that ignites the novel. Then everything changes.Ĭora, deciding to flee with Caesar, a fellow slave, finds herself swept into the great secret undertaking that is the underground railroad. The first 70 pages of The Underground Railroad are beautifully written and painful to read, but there is a sense of having been here before. In this opening section there are also nods to more recent influences: Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes, in particular. A familiar visual and linguistic idiom has developed by which novelists and film-makers address the subject of slavery. This is a book that wears its research lightly, but the subtly antique prose and detailed description combine to create a world that is entirely convincing.

First, it draws on traditional slave testimonies by the likes of Solomon Northup and Harriet Jacobs. This beginning of the novel strikes two clear chords. We meet her daughter, Mabel, who flees the plantation and its odious owner, Randall, prompting a wild and fruitless search, and Cora, Mabel’s daughter, our heroine.Ĭora and Caesar are led down to a platform where rails stretch away into darkness. Every dream a dream of escape even when it didn’t look like it.” We meet Ajarry, taken from her West African village and across the ocean on a slave ship. In the morning and in the afternoon and in the night.

The Underground Railroad begins on a particularly vicious Georgia plantation, where all anyone wants to do is escape. Bringing this brutal, vital, devastating novel to a wider audience (it has also been selected by Oprah’s book club) will not be the least of Obama’s legacies.

His 2016 summer holiday reading – released by the White House’s press department – not only included Helen Macdonald’s sublime H Is for Hawk, but also Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad. A s if we needed any more reason to mourn the passing of Barack Obama’s presidency, it’s difficult to believe that either of his potential successors will share his fine taste in books.

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead