It is, perhaps, fitting that a recent string of racially-themed novels have been getting widespread notices and praise. Something to do with the world going mad and the far-right gaining all kinds of baffling momentum, perhaps?
It is on this day that this book is being reviewed that the results from elections held in France made the news, and here we are, in 2017, breathing a sigh of relief and loudly applauding a nation for Not. Electing. Fascists. To. High. Office. This is where we are as a society – it is therefore no wonder that both The Sellout and now The Underground Railroad have been released and met with equal praise and accolades. They could not possibly be more timely.
This novel begins on a significantly brutal plantation in the deep south of the US, where all the poor souls there want to do is escape. Its within these first few dozen pages that the novel has its greatest (pejorative)impact (many have asked me, “Do you like it? and the answer is “I appreciate the craft – you can’t like something so brutal.”) We meet Ajarry, stolen from Africa and sent to the US on a slave ship; we meet her daughter, Mabel; and Cora, Mabel’s daughter, our heroine.
The titular railroad (famed by the likes of Harriet Tubman et al) was in real life a network of secret routes and safe houses established in the US during the early-to-mid 19th century, and used by slaves to escape into free states and Canada with the aid of abolitionists (and others) sympathetic to their cause. The moniker was also applied to the actual abolitionists, who aided these fugitives. Whitehead makes a choice in the book’s first section to have Cora, and her fellow escapee Caesar, led down to a platform to a network of actual railway tracks; it becomes set in a steampunk universe that never was. An actual railroad as opposed to a metaphorical one. Whitehead turns a metaphor into the tangible, making a metaphor in and of itself.
Talk about meta.
The narrative goes then from being a 12 Years a Slave-type biography to more of a thriller, where Cora is chased by the famed slave catcher Ridgeway, who we meet alongside one of your more colourful (pardon the term) characters, a Native American festooned with a necklace of human ears (images redolent of Jim Jarmusch’s film Dead Man come to mind quite frequently).
It’s in this character, Ridgeway, where we have the most pointed allusion to current affairs: the character espouses plausible diatribes about defending ‘the American spirit’, and ‘the American imperative’. Manifest destiny, flag, freedom, Fox News and all the rest. It’s all-but for a well-phrased soundbite for the character being a sounding board/rationalisation for a GOP candidacy, or alt-right frog meme.
Cora must endure an Anne Frank-like existence for a stretch of the novel (the implications and parallels were not lost) while in North Carolina, and the description of Tennessee being a barren Hell-like wasteland replete with biblical plagues (ala Cormac McCarthy’s The Road) did likewise not go unnoticed. To not see the startling invocations of the Black Lives Matter movement and the ongoing racial injustice permeating the United States is to not be paying attention
It is a small, blessed relief that the stunning filmmaker Barry Jenkins (Moonlight) will be adapting this novel for a limited series treatment on TV. It’s something to look forward to, as much as this novel is something to soak in and let it get to, affect, effect and infest your very soul.