“It is a very pleasing thing to watch a writer you have enjoyed for years reach an even higher level of achievement,” wrote Colson Whitehead in the New York Times recently. “To observe him or her consolidate strengths, share with us new reserves of talent and provide the inspiration that can only come from a true artist charting hidden creative territory.” He was reviewing Lincoln in the Bardo, George Saunders’ first novel, but many of Whitehead’s fans will feel the same way this week, after The Underground Railroad scooped a Pulitzer prize to add to the author’s National Book Award – making this the only novel to complete that particular double since Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News, back in 1994.
The novel is Whitehead’s sixth, so he is hardly an overnight sensation; but certainly in the UK, he is less well known than his audacious and ambitious fiction deserves – at least, up until now. But those novels, from 1999’s The Intuitionist, which turns on the arcane ways of rival groups of lift inspectors (no, really) to 2011’s Zone One and its hordes of zombies, demonstrate that the allegorical punch at the heart of The Underground Railroad is very much part of Whitehead’s arsenal.
The story of Cora and Caesar, slaves who have escaped from a plantation in Georgia, explodes into life around 60 pages in, when the pair are first confronted with a real steel and stone railway, running south and north, “springing from some inconceivable source and shooting toward a miraculous terminus”. Confronted with it, Cora can only contrast the stolen labour of slaves at work in the fields with the industry involved in this “marvel to be proud of”. And at once, Whitehead’s translation of a metaphorical railroad – the network of abolitionists who helped runaway slaves to freedom – into a reality begins to seem like fictional alchemy.
His creative impulse also speaks to a larger artistic issue: the freedom of writers of colour to enter into the world of speculative fiction, to mix and match genres that have hitherto been the preserve of white, and usually male, writers. Marlon James has spoken powerfully about a kind of reality trap, which demands that such writers make art only out of what is perceived to be their direct experience (as James pointed out, he was brought up in middle-class Jamaica, and A Brief History of Seven Killings is an act of multiple ventriloquism). In response, James is now embarked on a fantasy trilogy entitled Dark Star.
Where Whitehead will go next is as yet unknown, but with Barry Jenkins, director of the Oscar-winning film Moonlight, reported to be busy turning The Underground Railroad into a drama for Amazon, his profile can only get bigger. The book is also, it must be noted, eligible for this year’s Man Booker prize.
• Colson Whitehead is appearing at Sydney writers’ festival in May 2017
