Colson Whitehead
The Underground Railroad
[Doubleday]
The most striking feature of Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad is the intense and unyielding brutality of the world in which his characters struggle, and frequently fail, and usually die. Set in antebellum Georgia, the novel follows Cora, a young slave, who grew up motherless after her own mother’s successful escape from slavery. Encouraged by a fellow slave, Caesar, she decides to follow in her mother’s footsteps. Her attempts to leave the plantation on which she was born are abetted by the eponymous, clandestine, slave-built underground railroad. Her story is punctuated by brief glimpses into the lives of those who help her, often to their own detriment. These interstitials are remarkably colourful for their brevity.
Cora’s escape attempts read as a hellish odyssey, a kind of chthonic and frequently thwarted journey towards something better than her living nightmare. Whitehead’s America is a country where the good are punished, the evil and the well-meaning suffer alike, and where only the ugly and grasping have a chance at anything approaching success, if not happiness. More a portrait of a horrifically ugly time in a country than an individual journey, the novel is unflinching, and its world is deeply unfair. White people do awful, unforgivable things. Black people suffer, in ways which are depicted in disturbing detail (the inventive punishments for runaways include live immolation and goring). White people are rewarded. There is no justice, no redemption; Whitehead instead forces the reader to repeatedly acknowledge the depth of suffering wrought by slavery.
If the novel has failings, it’s that Cora’s use as a mouthpiece to discourse on the State of America becomes occasionally clumsy; the transition from character’s thought to pronouncement on the world is not always smooth. With that said, the novel is admirable for its refusal to make slavery even the least bit palatable (no feel-good white characters, no solace-in-hardship wisdom), and is ultimately successful in its endeavour to make the old wound of slavery bleed once more.
Words – Aisling O’Gara
