As he did in both Zone One and The Intuitionist, in The Underground Railroad Colson Whitehead finds a mode and register which serves the story he's telling - here, one that preserves a sense of concrete reality (which can only be valuable when slavery is the subject) as it melds in carefully controlled fabulism (the literalised railroad itself, as well as a general thread of feeling that runs through ... the episode in South Carolina, for example, made me think of a similar one in Watership Down). I appreciated the novel's commitment to giving voice and representation to many of its secondary characters, and while I felt a certain distance from its central figure Cora, that seemed fair enough given the type of character she is, and the circumstances that form her.
