Book review: Characters come to life in Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad

WITH an excerpt in the New York Times, a place in Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club and with it now being named Amazon’s book of 2016, Colson Whitehead’s latest novel The Underground Railroad arrives with a silo of hype and a bar set particularly high. Thankfully, the New York writer more than manages to meet these high expectations with a powerful, relentless novel that is tightly wrapped around a gripping story.

The Underground Railroad was a network of safe houses and sympathisers which ferried slaves from the south of America to the free states or Canada in the 19th century. In this novel, Whitehead masterfully takes the metaphorical railroad and turns it into a physical, breathing thing which frames the escape of two slaves, Cora and Cesar, from the wretched, inhumane horror of the Randall plantation.

Cora has misgivings at first about escaping, as she recalls her mother’s previous escape and the abandonment of her daughter. Whitehead manages to capture this emotional turmoil subtly and contrast it with the cat-o’-nine-tails fury of the plantation. The vast area of the plantation gives way to the miniscule scrap of land that Cora tends and guards jealously. The life of a slave is documented in detail, their affairs and feuds, their language and smiles all in the shadow of the plantations horror. The reader is never spared the grisly terror of the plantation. Hands are cut off, slaves are beaten to the bone, Cora is gang-raped, and captured escapees are tortured to death. Whitehead doesn’t shield the reader from these horrors but he does offer us Cora and before her Mabel and the light of freedom that drives them to try to escape.