●●●○○

Arts awards these days tend to focus as much on the worthiness of theme as on the quality of the content. The bestowing of the National Book Award on The Underground Railroad, a novel about the cruelty of slavery and the oppression facing those embroiled in it, might in part have something to do with this tendency to award issues rather than awarding literature itself – for although it is entertaining, this book is highly flawed.

The plot is simple: a young slave girl by the name of Cora runs away from her plantation and its sadistic owner and embarks on an odyssey across 1830s America. Along the way she is dogged at every turn by the merciless slave-catcher Ridgeway, the Javert to Cora’s Jean Valjean; helped and hindered by a collection of background characters with various inclinations towards either good or evil.

Most of these characters drop in and out, as small pieces in the jigsaw of America that Whitehead is constructing, and then are quickly forgotten. Whitehead attempts to give every named character a backstory of some kind, but ends up simplistically spelling out the origin of most aspects of their personality, without fully developing them.

Slavery being, in truth, a very difficult subject matter to tackle without alienating the reader, Whitehead reverts to descriptions of horrific violence that resemble news reports in their dryness and lack of ornament. While this can sometimes be effective, at other times it can feel like a cop-out.

To do it justice, the book is highly entertaining, very readable, and peppered with brilliantly imagined scenes. It is at its best for the first 70 pages, where Whitehead explores the slave plantation with some genuine depth and reveals previously hidden aspects of its being. From here on, sadly, it glides on the surface of America and although the ride is thrilling at times, the reader is left with an unsatisfied sense of having missed something potentially fascinating.