The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead review – luminous, furious and wildly inventive

As 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. 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. 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.

The Underground Railroad begins on a particularly vicious Georgia plantation, where all anyone wants to do is escape. “Every slave thinks about it. In the morning and in the afternoon and in the night. Dreaming of it. 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. 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.

This beginning of the novel strikes two clear chords. First, it draws on traditional slave testimonies by the likes of Solomon Northup and Harriet Jacobs. 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. 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. 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. Then everything changes.

Cora, deciding to flee with Caesar, a fellow slave, finds herself swept into the great secret undertaking that is the underground railroad. And here is the spark that ignites the novel. 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. Cora and Caesar are led through a trapdoor and down to a subterranean platform where rails stretch away into darkness. A train pulls up, heading north. It’s a brilliant conceit, and from this point forwards, the book takes on a visionary new life. Whitehead has always been one of those authors who move effortlessly between genres, as at home in the rigorously researched historical fiction of John Henry Days as he was in the futuristic zombie world of Zone One. Here, it’s as if he’s attempting to cram as many genres into one novel as possible, with science fiction meeting fantasy and a picaresque adventure tale, all against the backdrop of a reimagined 19th-century America.

The narrative then doesn’t draw breath as Cora is pursued by the malevolent slave catcher Ridgeway, whom we first meet attended by “a fearsome Indian scout who wore a necklace of shrivelled ears”. Ridgeway has as his life’s mission the need to defend “the American spirit, the one that called us from the Old World to the New, to conquer and build and civilise. And destroy that what needs to be destroyed. To lift up the lesser races. If not lift up, subjugate. And if not subjugate, exterminate. Our destiny by divine prescription – the American imperative.”

Cora rises from the underground railway into a world of bodysnatchers, night riders, sinister doctors, heroic station agents, conflicted abolitionists. She finds love, loses it, is happy for brief snatches of time before the remorseless Ridgeway catches up with her, and she must flee again. There’s something Thomas Pynchon-like about the novel, but without Pynchon’s desiccating distance, his endless tangents. Everything in Whitehead’s narrative is honed to scintillating sharpness.

Alongside the tumultuous intermingling of genres, there’s a distinct allegorical flavour to Cora’s journey. Each state she emerges into appears to present a new face of the horrors of slavery. South Carolina, with its skyscrapers redolent of Alan Moore’s From Hell, and its seemingly benevolent approach to “the negro problem”, is hiding dark secrets beneath its pristine exterior. North Carolina has decided to drive its black population out of the state altogether: “In North Carolina the negro race did not exist except at the ends of ropes.” Roving mobs hang any blacks who remain along its freedom trail, where the “corpses went on for ever it seemed, in every direction”. Here, Cora is made to live an Anne Frank existence in an attic – the parallel is clear enough that it must be intended. Then there’s Tennessee, beset by biblical plagues, a hellish wasteland of burnt woods and quarantine towns overrun by yellow fever.

It’s at the end of the novel, though, that the allegorical mode is felt most strongly. It’s to Whitehead’s credit that he never strikes too hard on the parallels between America’s current racial crisis and the material of his story (although the reader can often think of nothing else). Instead, the author looks backwards, to a previous genocide – the massacre of Native Americans – and seeks to show that, as one character puts it, “America, too, is a delusion, the grandest one of all. The white race believes – believes with all its heart – that it is their right to take the land. To kill Indians. Make war. Enslave their brothers. This nation shouldn’t exist, if there is any justice in the world, for its foundations are murder, theft and cruelty.” The book’s final pages, which are almost unbearably poignant, seem to offer a model of resistance, a small gleam of hope.

I haven’t been as simultaneously moved and entertained by a book for many years. This is a luminous, furious, wildly inventive tale that not only shines a bright light on one of the darkest periods of history, but also opens up thrilling new vistas for the form of the novel itself.

The Underground Railroad is published by Fleet (£14.99). Click here to buy it for £12.29