The Underground Railroad: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2017 Hardcover – 6 Oct. 2016

Superb, great story and a must read. Brilliant 🤩

The harrowing blast of the opening sections on the Randall’s Georgia plantation rams home what it meant to be a slave in C19 America: a chattel to be bought, sold or abused on a whim, worked to death, favoured for a while before being discarded, publicly tortured and murdered as an example to others in the event of a failed escape attempt. The pecking order amongst the slaves is also revealed, with battles over the strips of land between huts, vital to grow extra food or keep a goat, the arrogance or bullying on the part of those emboldened by being in the boss’s favour, the general contempt for those too sick, crazed or weak to work.The heroine Cora only survives abandonment as a child by her mother Martha because her reckless courage is taken by the other slaves as a form of insanity, meaning that she is best left alone. When conditions on the cotton plantation deteriorate even further, Cora is at last motivated to Martha, and escape with fellow-slave Caesar, who has made a vital contact enabling them to disappear on the “underground railway”.The author’s decision to make this a real train on rails, rather than the network of support which it was in reality, has been described as a stroke of inventive genius. This device could serve to show the dramatic effect on Cora of being propelled rapidly into what is for her an unfamiliar and strikingly different world, although Colson Whitehead does not choose to make much of this aspect. It is a relief to have a break from the intense violence of the plantation. Yet the story of the real underground network is so interesting that it could have stood in its own right without the need for gimmicks or magic realism. I was irritated to be asked to suspend my disbelief: in the state of Georgia where so many were dedicated to capturing runaway slaves, how on earth could a real railway line have remained undetected over the years? Once located, the whole system would have been rendered redundant at a stroke. It would have been more challenging for the writer, also more engaging and fulfilling for the reader to witness Cora working her way across the States with the help of enlightened individuals, gradually learning about the world outside the plantation. Perhaps the worst effect of the invented railway line is that one can no longer judge what else may be purely a flight of Colson Whitehead’s imagination. I do not recall him providing a single date in the main text. The acknowledgements at the end are very scanty. I accept that creative writing can be applied to anything, but an important topic like the gradual process of abolition of slavery calls for a bit more grounding, if only in a solid appendix.I was interested to see the differences between states without knowing how far they were based on truth: South Carolina seemed liberal, until it became clear that black women were being pressurised to accept sterilisation as a means of keeping the freed former slave population under control. North Carolina was more overtly brutal, with its chilling Friday sessions to hold public lynchings to provide exhibits for the sinister “Freedom Trail”. Even the apparent haven of a utopian community for ex-slaves in Indiana arouses the fear of white neighbours and resentment from those who have bought their freedom and feel threatened by others who have simply run away.The narrative loses momentum after Cora’s first escape by rail, seeming to drift into the back stories of characters like Ridgeway, the driven slave-chaser who, having failed to track down Martha makes it his business to capture Cora. There is an odd digression into body-snatching which seems to have no connection with the rest of the novel. Characters are generally two-dimensional, the storyline sometimes disjointed and dialogues artificial, used as a means of informing the reader rather than communicating in convincing “voices”.Perhaps this brutal tale will make most impact on readers who come to it with little or no prior knowledge of the appalling injustice of slavery. The novel appears to have been somewhat over-hyped, but at least it inspired me to research further online about, for instance, Harriet Tubman, the escaped slave who risked her life leading others to freedom.

This novel by one of America’s top black writers is a stark tale that describes the brutality of slavery. Cora’s story is episodic in her journey from her bondage into one nightmare scenario to the next. It is relentlessly dark as befits the subject, and if I have one criticism it is there is little light that shines through. Inspired to explore more of this author’s work.

This book grew on me after I finished it. Immediately afterwards, I thought of at as well written, engaging, easy to be engrossed by, politically significant, and individually touching. It was only afterwards that I fully appreciated the depth and sheer inventiveness of the story-telling. My one quibble is perhaps with the central construct the railroad itself.This is primarily the story of two people. Cora is the granddaughter of an African ripped from her home by slavers, and daughter of an escaped, disappeared slave. Ridgewater is the white son of a blacksmith, who finds a purpose in life through capturing and returning escaped slaves to their owners.Reluctant at first, Cora is finally prompted to escape by the brutal beating of a young boy, and it is on her first encounter with the railroad that she is told will see all of America from it. Taken literally this is a strange statement as the railroad is underground and dark, and Cora falls asleep on her first journey. Taken more widely, on her travels, Cora get a vision of an America born in the blood and suffering of the First Nations and, more directly, of enslaved African Americans. The railroad transports her to a hyper-America where there is individual goodness within the white community, but institutionally society enslaves African Americans, or seeks to eradicate them entirely, either quickly and violently, or slowly with a scientific and seemingly caring face. While this is absolutely a book about slavery and about the associated racism, at times it seems to stretch even further into a wider exploration of the consequences of xenophobia. This is particularly true of the North Carolina section where Cora transcends the American experience, becoming an Anne Frank like figure. Whitehead also gives an ultimate blasted earth view of the consequences of a divided society in a section in a plague-wracked Tennessee.For all that this is a dark and deeply critical view of America, the book can be read as ending on a note which reflects a very American, even Republican GOP viewpoint. In the end Cora's potential salvation comes from self reliance, assisted by an individual act of kindness. All collective, community institutions fail her, even a society built for African Americans, with a light skinned leader (Obama?) cannot save her from the forces of reaction. It is also a note of African American empowerment, with Cora ultimately rejecting white assistance.The book is powerful, horrifying and harrowing, and where author Colson Whitehead succeeds is in portraying the darkness, but not wallowing in it. Thus he manages to communicate his message without getting lost beneath it. It is a lightness of touch which manages to convey the full horror, where a heavier handed approach may have become alienating.The problematic element of the book is the railroad itself. It serves to transport Cora into alternative, but closely related Americas, and her mode of transport is a metaphor for what she will find, but ultimately, there is a huge construct and the centre of the book which feels rather under used and indeed under explained. While the book is absolutely superb, the Railroad itself might have been more satisfyingly used by Mieiville, Gaiman, or indeed Dave Hutchinson.In short, the Underground Railroad is a superb book, except for the underground railroad which could have been better used.