Book review: Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railway explores racial issues that persist in American society to the present day

Although it’s set in Georgia during the 1850s, The Underground Railway resonates with the current political atmosphere in America. We talk to the writer, whose eighth book is a front runner for the National Book Award.

American writer Colson Whitehead. Getty Images

If anyone can make sense of the US presidential election, it is Colson Whitehead. At the same time as Donald Trump was visiting the White House for the first time, the writer of The Underground Railroad – a stunning novel about Cora, a young female slave in 1850s Georgia, which rightly won praise from Oprah Winfrey and Barack Obama – was telling The National what the Republican's victory says about America. Whitehead, it transpires, isn't shocked at all, not least because it feels like he has already worked out what America is all about in his brilliant tale of ­Cora's escape from plantation life.

“She begins the book in some kind of horror, and by the end she’s in a better place, and I can feel optimistic for her,” he says. “And that is basically America’s relationship to race. There are advances, like the end of slavery, and then you have reconstruction, a new phase of black oppression, the Jim Crow segregation laws and the Ku Klux Klan.

“In the 21st century, you have an African ­American president, and then the resentment of that drives people so mad there is a resurgence of the pent-up hatred that has shaped American history, as mostly white men realise they only control 90 per cent of things, rather than 100 per cent. So the anti-immigrant rhetoric of Trump is the same racist, bigoted energy that I describe in this book set in 1850.

"If you're talking about race in history, you're talking about race in the present, although when I was finishing The Underground Railroad, it did seem like these demonising forces could not possibly triumph in November 2016. But they did, because racism and bigotry drives human behaviour, sadly. And now it will shape my country's history for the next four years."

In a nutshell, this is why The Underground Railroad feels like required reading at this moment in time. It might be an excoriating examination of the brutal urges that have always driven America, but it is also a fugitive thriller, an adventure story, even a fantasy. What starts out as a seemingly straightforward historical novel, set on a plantation in Georgia, changes into something exhilaratingly new when Cora steps onto a literal underground railroad as part of her escape from a brutal slave master.

"The underground railroad is the terminology for the secret routes and safe houses used by slaves to escape to free states, and as a school kid, you do think of it as being an actual subway beneath the earth," says Whitehead. "So I wanted to write a book where that was actually the case.

"Then I thought that Cora could get off the railroad in different states, each one a different facet of American possibility, like Gulliver's Travels. I could keep expanding the canvas and change reality in a way that was fun for me as a creator. It's magic realism, in a low-key kind of way."

It sounds such a simple idea, but it took a long time to gel in Whitehead’s mind. He says he felt like he needed to be a better writer to tackle the story properly, not least because it would require such a “deep dive into slave history”, with all the responsibilities that might entail. “I needed to be in a good place professionally and emotionally to pull it off,” he says.

Some of his experience reveals itself in the tremendous character of Cora, who is stoic and self-assured, almost inured to “travesties so routine they’re a kind of weather”. And some of it is in the fantastical structure, raising the book to a level far above straight historical fiction.

“It allowed me to put different periods of American history in conversation with each other,” he says. “So the medical-experiments programme on black people in the book didn’t actually happen in 1850, but the early 20th century. The white supremacist language that justifies slavery is the same language that justified the Holocaust.

“My motto was not to stick to the facts of 1850, but the truth of oppression and the oppressor in general – and basically, it’s all the same people, saying the same things. The racial horror in the book is no different to the kinds of comments heard at Trump rallies about Mexicans, Muslims or women.”

Yet Whitehead is adamant that he was not trying to comment on current society. He might be right – in fact, he shines a light on society in general – and the fact that he does not try to hammer any message home is a another reason why his eighth book is deservedly a front runner in the fiction category of the National Book Award, the American literary prize, the winners of which will be announced on November 16. Obama, it seems, has very good literary taste. What does the author think of the book’s high-profile fan?

“Even in the spring I was thinking: ‘We’re ­gonna miss that guy.’ Now, we’re definitely going to miss him,” says Whitehead, with a smile. “He’s such a unique figure, so I was very honoured that he should be so kind about my book.

“I think I’m gonna invite him over for ribs once he gets out,” he adds, laughing. “I mean, his schedule should be pretty clear soon, right? Next time he’s in New York, I’ll ask.”

• The winners of the National Book Awards will be announced in the US on November 16. A live stream of the ceremony begins at 4.40am UAE time, November 17.