Book Review: Underground Airlines by Ben H. Winters - Entrepreneur Generations

My last book of an active summer of reading -- er, listening, mostly -- to books ended with Ben H. Winters' novel Underground Airlines, a novel of speculative fiction that supposes that the Civil War never took place, and that four southern states -- the "hard four" -- still have legal slavery of Black people.

In this world, Abraham Lincoln was assassinated before he took office, and, through a series of slow compromises and an amendment to the Constitution, all of the states except for four have eliminated slavery. But in these four states, it is still legal to own black people; in the other states, black people are free. Corporations have different names in these slavery states than in the north, so people in the north won't know their connection to slavery.

The first-person protagonist is Victor, a former slave who has traded his slavery for a job as a hunter of escaped slaves -- a "soul catcher" -- and his latest escaped slave to catch is a young man named Jackdaw. But as he's searching for him in Indianapolis, he soon begins to realize that there's something different about this case, something he can't quite put a finger on.

The titular "underground airlines" refers to, as you can guess, a network of friends to escaped slaves who assist the fleeing. Not always a literal airline, but sometimes (often ex-slaves have to leave the country), the airlines are full of sympathetic free black people and whites. As one can expect, Victor is full of conflict over his profession, which has him going undercover to try to expose workers of the underground airlines, and for which he has been highly trained by the American government. As his dissonance becomes more palpable, the novel becomes more gripping.

At times a hard-boiled detective novel, at times a thriller, and always thought-provoking, Winters is exploring the powerful idea that, even if the United States still had states with slavery, things wouldn't be that different. There are sections of the narrative about white privilege and law enforcement that sent chills up my spine, as the parallels with our own society felt both painfully authentic and riveting. Even seemingly off-the-cuff mentions -- James Brown is still a great singer, but one who escaped slavery to Canada, and now performs in Europe, protesting the treatment of black people in America -- have resonance. I especially liked a layered riff on To Kill a Mockingbird.

I read Winters' novel directly after Colson Whitehead's brilliant Underground Railroad (my review here), and, while I didn't openly cry like I did during that novel, Underground Airlines also had chilling and poignant moments. I didn't think Underground Airlines wrapped up a couple of its threads (particularly the flashbacks with the brother) enough, but was impressed by its language and fast, unpredictable story and thought-provoking ideas.

What role does race have in the authorship and even reviewing of a novel about race with a black narrator? Winters is white; I am white. I found the novel very compelling, its treatment of race to be one of recognizing white supremacy in America and the challenges of overcoming it. The story was terrific; I liked this piece of speculative fiction much better than Phillip Roth's The Plot Against America. And I do think teenagers would love it, though I couldn't justify choosing this one over something like Octavia Butler's Kindred  or Whitehead's Underground Railroad. But as a companion? Certainly. I'd be extremely interested in hearing from black readers who have read this book, their feelings about it. For me, Underground Airlines is an awesome read, one that I would recommend to anyone.

from Epiphany in Baltimore http://ift.tt/2bDh6m0 Book Review: Underground Airlines by Ben H. Winters - Entrepreneur Generations

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