Underground Railroad runs on imagination
The Vancouver Sun’s book club is discussing The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead, who will be appearing at the Vancouver Writers Fest this month. The Underground Railroad is about a young slave who tries to escape and it is Oprah’s latest book club pic. Whitehead has written eight books and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. We will be chatting live with Whitehead on Friday, Oct. 21 at 11:15 at vancouversun.com/ books.
Valerie Casselton: Although we are told again and again that only slaves could have built the railroad, it was rather difficult to get one’s head around this, given that slaves had scant hours in a week to themselves after doing the masters’ work.
However, that aside, the railroad was a perfect device to transport the reader from state to state, in order to then explain the very different slave experience and social attitudes in each place. The darkness of the tunnels, the blackness ahead, and the granite below ground all metaphorically related to the fearful implications of flight and the courage required by slaves to run from their chains. Melanie Jackson: This book is well written and plotted, and the characters get under your skin so that you can’t stop thinking about them even when you set it down. It doesn’t matter if the setting is gritty realistic or magic realistic. I don’t buy the argument that you have to suspend disbelief for a novel featuring a real underground railroad when the historical one was metaphorical. C’mon. You’re suspending disbelief every time you crack open a work of fiction. As with any story, it always comes back to the quality of the writing. If it’s good the genre doesn’t matter. (Which is why I find it baffling when someone says they hate mysteries or sci-fi, or whatever.)
So, I’m on board with the magic realism in this novel.
Ian Weir: I’m with Melanie, as regards the realism of the railroad. It seems to me that the only question that matters is whether a novel is true to its own internal logic — and this one is, emphatically so. Stylistically, Whitehead’s novel is a wholly different kettle of fish than — for instance — Lawrence Hill’s brilliant (and essentially realistic) The Book of Negroes. I was initially startled by the gearshift when it occurred, but startled in a good way. The decision to treat the railroad as something literal was, I think, es- thetically freeing and exhilarating for the reader.
Julia Denholm: As many of you know, I read quite a lot of shlock fiction — my current diversion revolves around a 20th-century woman who winds up in 18thcentury Scotland. So let’s say that my willingness to suspend belief is pretty well developed. But I didn’t really have any trouble at all believing in a real underground railroad, possibly because in my head I have always visualized it as an actual railroad, not a metaphor.
Maybe that’s why I like this book so much. The jump from a metaphoric to a real railroad is not such a big one, but it makes this story possible. Travelling on the underground railroad is kind of a reverse metaphor for the slave-ship journey that opens the novel — instead of a terrifying, dark, and (frequently) deadly passage to a miserable life of servitude, however, in this case the terrifying, dark, and (frequently) deadly passage is the bumpy road to freedom.
Last week we saw Angels in America, a play set in 1985-6 that deals with (among other things) the AIDS crisis. Twenty-five years on, the play seems enormously relevant; more than a generation has grown up without knowing these stories. I think the same holds true here — the crisis of racism in our contemporary culture has reached a boiling point, yet many young people don’t know the history of the persecution and systemic oppression of black Americans. Our book club panel includes Ian Weir, author of the novel Will Starling; Vancouver young adult author Melanie Jackson; Julia Denholm, dean, arts and sciences, Capilano University; Daphne Wood, director, communications and development, Greater Victoria Public Library; Monique Sherrett, principal at Boxcar Marketing and founder of somisguided.com; Trevor Battye, a partner in Clevers Media; Tracy Sherlock, Vancouver Sun books editor; Bev Wake, senior executive producer sports for Postmedia Network; Valerie Casselton, managing editor of The Vancouver Sun and Province; and Kelly Sinoski, reporter for The Vancouver Sun and Province.