These two quotes (from the double review that Mary13’s post #96 links to) address something I thought about when reading Underground Airlines. I didn’t particularly like Victor as a hard-boiled noir character. It kind of made me squirm to see him depicted as quite handsome (he was referred to once as “big,” too), and oh-so-clever at the kind of trickster role-playing that included wresting information from females by flirting with them.
“Riding along” and “putting our own moral certitude in danger” – I think Winters made it a little too easy to sympathize with Victor and for the reader almost to forget that much of what he was doing was very, very wrong.
Another thing that was problematical to me was that Winters had Victor think about his friend Castle a lot, but it was almost exclusively about his affection for Castle during their early years. Then, fairly far along in the book, we learn (in kind of a glancing, indirect way) that Victor killed Castle!! This is never directly addressed in Winters’ descriptions of Victor’s thoughts and memories – eww, I say.
^^ Castle was Victor’s brother…and I thought Victor shied away from Castle’s death (and the role he played in it) because of the pain and self-loathing it engendered.
I liked Airlines better than Railroad – I really wanted to like Railroad more than I did but I found the inconsistencies (the Tuskegee Experiment in 1850?) too jarring. I know, I know – there are inconsistencies in Winters’ book as well, but at least I knew at the outset that it was an alternative history. The only part of Whitehead’s book I liked was the ending.
And I’m sure I’m biased towards Winters’ book because I am a huge fan of the Last Policeman trilogy that @jaylynn mentioned. Seriously, it’s a fabulous trilogy. I still think about the ending of the last installment, as the meteor comes closer to earth.
Was Castle really Victor’s biological brother? I didn’t think it was clear whether that was the case, or whether Castle was someone Victor had been very close to, growing up and called “brother.” Would it have been harder to kill one’s biological brother?
In addition, Winters never told us whether the slaves knew who their parents were. Who cared for them when they were very small children? I thought all of that was glossed over a little too much.
I doubt Castle is Victor’s biological brother. For example, when Victor tries to convince Dr. V. to tell him about Jackdaw, he calls Jackdaw his brother - not biological brother but “raised up together, eyes on each other, family.” I’m thinking Castle and Victor fall into that category. You know what I did find odd: the terms of endearment Castle and Victor use. Castle calls Victor “honey” and “love” instead of the more logical “Brother.” At the end of the book, after Victor tells Martha everything, he thinks:
I just find the endearment “darling” … odd. Thoughts?
One of the things I like about Underground Airlines is Victor as unreliable narrator. He makes it clear early on that even what he tells himself might be a step away from the truth: how many runaways caught, etc. I agree with @scout59 that Victor steps away from the truth because he can’t face it without pain and self-loathing. Telling Martha his “whole story” is a mind-boggling act of faith coming from Victor.
I also that think Winters shows Victor’s feelings of guilt and regret - again self-loathing - over what he does for the U.S. Marshals. Only when he takes steps to move away from what he does to remain free can he start connecting with Martha and admitting truths easily to himself and others. I think that’s why you don’t learn his truths about Castle till late in the book. I sympathized with Castle because he knows what he’s doing is wrong, does it anyway to stay free, and clearly steps away from thoughts of it any way he can.
I wasn’t sure at first if Castle was Victor’s biological brother or friend-brother. Then, I concluded they must be friend-brothers.
Then, I wondered if the author was hinting there was a gay relationship blooming between them, or if it was one-sided? Or maybe the late night whisperings could be interrupted as a gay love, and there was a threat of being turned in and punished?
I don’t remember all the details but I do remember not being sure what their relationship was all about.
I didn’t understand the need for that plot surprise. Why couldn’t Castle have met his end in, let’s say, a tussle with Reedy during that same fateful scene? If Ben Winters’ goal was to create a character who was haunted by the sins of his past, then making him a slave catcher seems like plenty of sins to me without adding another horrific one. Also, I wasn’t convinced that the murder would really happen that way. I guess it is supposed to show Victor’s utter desperation for freedom; nonetheless, it was hard for me to believe that he would claw his way out by killing the only person in the world whom he loved.
As for the relationship between Castle and Victor, I viewed the “my brother” label as a metaphorical expression of their close friendship; I figured that the slave “industry” would not allow biological brothers to stay together. As the story progressed, I wondered if there was more to their relationship than I had originally thought…Although it’s not unheard of for brothers to call each other “my love,” “honey” and “my darling,” it’s definitely unusual. I thought that I might be overreaching, but I see that @ignatius and @Midwest67 had the same thought.
I loved that relationship and the twist. It made Victor’s story all the more heartbreaking. It was the defining moment in his life. I think he was a slave catcher BECAUSE of the self-loathing of that incident.
I thought they addressed one another that way because they were so close and had no other family whom they could be with – and had no opportunity to be with women. Or conceivably (it’s a reach), it was part of slave culture for siblings to use that form of address.
Can’t believe I forgot about the mother reference after reading the book twice and taking notes the second time.
I agree with jaylynn. The manner of his escape broke him. I always assumed that there was a romantic love between Castle and Victor - not necessarily acted on, but closer than brothers. But yes, it’s also possible that it was supposed to be the vocabulary of the slaves - it certainly has echoes of the 19th century overwrought vocabulary of friendship.
I just finished Underground Airlines yesterday. I finished Underground Railroad a couple weeks ago. I’m still deciding how much I like the books. I didn’t like the way they made me feel emotionally, so the authors did a good job sharing the horror of slavery, but I’m not sure I’m on board with the added history in Underground Railroad or the new history of Underground Airlines.
I listened to the audio, so the tone of voice of the narrator influenced me. The voice used between Castle and Victor was intimate, but I didn’t interpret it as sexual. It felt more like a big brother to little brother relationship. A big brother who was also playing the role of parent.
Underground Airlines has been referred to several times as a form of “noir fiction.” Although I had a pretty strong sense of the genre, I went to good old Wikipedia for a precise definition.
That describes Victor perfectly. To top it off, he’s not merely “a victim, a suspect, or a perpetrator,” he’s a victim, a suspect AND a perpetrator. The definition goes on to further describe the typical protagonist as someone tied to a corrupt legal, political or other system, “who is victimized and/or has to victimize others on a daily basis.” Sounds familiar!
Victor’s narration brings a lot of ambiguity to the story. I found passages that deliberately don’t answer some of the questions asked in our posts above. For example, did Victor have a romantic relationship with Castle? Martha asks him a question on p. 156:
There are a few different ways that passage could be interpreted. (And @Caraid’s post adds another level of ambiguity – what we hear can leave us with a different impression from words that we only read.)
Another example (raised by @VeryHappy), did Victor really have a chip in him or not? In the end, he believes Bridge removes it,feels the pain, but was it ever really there? From p. 132:
Again, the passage doesn’t definitely answer the question. Maybe the three men in suits were…just three men in suits. Maybe Bridge didn’t mention the trip because he had no idea it ever happened. Maybe, maybe not.
Victor’s words above echo the final ones in the novel: “Everything can happen. Everything is real.” The difference is that the first time he says it, it is in a scenario of hopelessness, but the second time, in hope.
Wasn’t the priest tracking Victor, with the tracking software obtained by the undercover bounty hunter-cop-underground airlines operative (I can’t remember his name!).
I originally thought they were just 3 men in suits, but when Victor saw his dot blinking on the priest’s computer screen, didn’t that prove he was being tracked? Or was he just being tracked by them?
One of reasons I like Underground Railroad better than Underground Airlines is the lack of ambiguity in the relationships among the characters in Whitehead’s writing. Quite different from Winters, although of course Winters was writing about people who had good reasons to conceal information from one another
Whitehead writes with an appealing clarity and an emotional delicacy and sensitivity that I really appreciate, despite his historical mish-mash. One manifestation of this was the “back stories” he provided for characters like Ridgeway and for Ethel, the white woman who nursed Cora tenderly because she had once wanted to be a missionary.
This is my favorite passage in Underground Railroad:
But it kind of does matter. And I don’t think Barton is telling the truth. I could pull the same trick on my teenager with the “Find My iPhone” app. (hmmm, there’s an idea ). Victor pushes him on it again: “I don’t understand something here. You’re tracking me, but my handler–my boss–he’s tracking me, too. So–”, and Barton silences him with a raised hand and changes the subject.
I liked the way Whitehead developed his characters. However, although there may not be ambiguity in their relationships, there is sometimes…ambivalence. I’m not sure that’s the right word, there may be a better one. Whitehead emphasized in the Spotlight interview that the slaves didn’t always have one another’s backs because they simply couldn’t and still survive. He read aloud the part about Cora’s feeling as she helped Chester: “It grabbed hold of her and before the slave part of her caught up with the human part of her, she was bent over the boy’s body as a shield” (p. 34).
I went back and listened to the interview again. Whitehead said that he believed that the notion of a plantation where the slaves helped out one another–the kind described in Uncle Tom’s Cabin–was a myth. Rather, when you are brutalized every day of your life, you are not going to be fighting for each other, but for a piece of dirt, a scrap of food or an extra blanket. He said people become “deformed” by inhuman treatment and that is what he tried to express in his novel. He studied PTSD and how it lingers and forms one’s personality.
Ben Winters responded that he did the same thing for Underground Airlines. In preparation for creating his modern plantation, he read a memoir of a a gulag in North Korea, which drove home the point that “people suffering under the same boot heel turn on each other,” although there are always sparks of humanity and nobility.
I was glad I listened to the interview again, because it reinforced the thematic connections between the two books. It’s not just the PTSD issues, but also the basic fact that, as Colson Whitehead put it, “Progress is excruciatingly slow when it comes to matters of race in America.”
^The plantation was quite grim, and the slaves needed to be cautious in their relations with one another, but there was more openness and trust in the parts of the book where white people were helpful, or where the ex-slaves were in a better situation. Examples:
Caesar and his family’s owners in Virginia (though that did not end well)
Yes, I didn’t mean to imply that there weren’t many acts of kindness in both books; there were. I liked the scene in Underground Airlines where the overseer on the train quickly and quietly forges Newell’s thumbprint to save Victor (p. 282):
). Victor pushes him on it again: “I don’t understand something here. You’re tracking me, but my handler–my boss–he’s tracking me, too. So–”, and Barton silences him with a raised hand and changes the subject.