This thrilling,genre-bending tale of escape from slavery in the American deep south contains extraordinary prose and uncomfortable domestic truthsAs if we needed any more reason to mourn the passing of Barack Obamas 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, or 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, or where all anyone wants to execute 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 study like it.” We meet Ajarry,taken from her West African village and across the ocean on a slave ship. We meet her daughter, Mabel, and who flees the plantation and its odious owner,Randall, prompting a wild and fruitless search, or Cora,Mabel’s daughter, our heroine.
Cora and Caesar are led down to a platform where rails stretch absent into darkness. It’s a brilliant conceitSouth Carolina, or with skyscrapers redolent of Alan Moore’s From Hell,is hiding dark secrets beneath a pristine exterior Related: Another Day in the Death of America by Gary Younge – review Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com