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Underground
Sixteen-year-old Albert Fraser believes that serving in the First World War will make him a man. What he doesn’t realize is the type of man he will become, until a shell blast buries him alive in a trench at the Somme. Albert emerges from the war with a driving need to fill the empty spaces left by the shrapnel that continues to burrow beneath his skin. Back home in Vancouver, he works to keep busy and when the Great Depression hits, he rides the rails and takes jobs as they come, eventually finding his way to the Yukon. But with no real place to call home, he seems destined to wander aimlessly. When the Spanish Civil War erupts, he seeks out Picasso’s Guernica and sees in the painting a reflection of what his life has become. Now he travels to Spain, a soldier once more, to reclaim all he has lost — or to die trying.
246 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2009
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
May 19, 2009
4 ½ stars
I love the way June Hutton writes; I got so caught up in the narrative of Underground that I read it in one sitting. As Lynda Grace Philippsen said in her review in the Globe and Mail (April 11), “Hutton’s prose is taut and lean, elegant and poetic….” This is not a long book, but it covers two decades, two wars, numerous settings, and scenes that flash back to the past, and leap ahead.
The story literally explodes onto the page as the protagonist, Al Fraser, is hit by a shell blast and buried alive: He doesn’t hear a sound, not a thing. His hands are still clutching his boot when the cold air becomes an oven, hot breath roars into his ears. A heavy hand clamps onto his skull and flings him up into folds of hot air, each layer hotter than the last. Upside down in that mud sky his guts jam against his lungs, his lungs crush into his throat, while the row of turtle shells below him bursts apart like a broken string of beads. The brown sky balloons and then collapses, hurtles him back to the ground. He falls through the air, past rocks and boots and shells that spin like tops, into the same brown dirt that has lifted him and now, instantly, buries him. The year is 1916, in the Somme.
We next find Al in an English hospital where his legs feel “heavy as tree trunks”. That’s because they are full of shrapnel. The surgeon removes as much as he can, but throughout the story, all the way to its end, pieces of shrapnel rise to the surface of his skin. This serves as a reminder of what Al experienced, while also making the reader question when the next piece will surface. First a lump, then the tip of metal pokes through the skin, and Al digs it out with a knife, as though it is a sliver. Visceral images such as this abound throughout the narrative.
Al worked two years in the coal mines of Nanaimo before lying to get into the Great War at the age of 16, so that he could get away from working underground – ironically, given the opening scene of the novel. From England, he returns home to Princeton, BC. His sister and eventually, his parents die, leaving only brother Jack with his older girlfriend, Agnes, left as family.
A decade later, Al paints houses in the Shaughnessy mansions in Vancouver. He is happily working above ground, and his work is so good, his Italian co-workers call him Michelangelo. Alas, this is not destined to last because now the Great Depression descends, and before long Al is living the life of a hobo on the shores of False Creek. But not for long: in a raid, he and the others are rounded up, and sent to work building a highway not far from Princeton, where Jack and Agnes still live. When the workers go to Vancouver to fight for a better wage than twenty cents a day, Al fights with a policeman, and because he foolishly blurted out his true name, he flees.
Al hides, underground yet again, this time under the streets of Chinatown. With only filtered light during the day, and deep darkness at night, Al relives the horrors of being buried alive, but this time it is told in chilling detail. Still, when the strikers leave for Ottawa and he must leave the tunnels, Al knows he can’t go stay with Jack and Agnes. The only place he can think to go to is north, to the Yukon. His bunkmate, Henderson, at the work camp, had given him a contact. Here Hutton’s personal experience living in Whitehorse at one time, serves her well. I enjoyed reading about the seasonal changes and what it’s like to live in the north.
Given a new last name, Al believes he can start all over. “Alex Johnson had no darkness inside him. Alex Johnson had never been to war.” He gets a passport (stamped Not valid for Spain), and heads to Paris with Henderson. There he sees Picasso’s Guernica, depicting the bombing in the Spanish Civil War. The painting reflects his own experience, and what he has become. He becomes one of the 1700 Canadians to volunteer to fight in this war.
And so begins the final detailed section of the narrative, where fighting in this war is not what Al expected, but neither had he expected to find love.
The last jump in time is almost four decades, and is covered in a mere eight pages. I wish it could have been fifty pages long. I wanted to know more about Al and his new life. But perhaps that is just me. As it is, I did turn the last page with a tear in my eye. And that counts for a lot.
I love the way June Hutton writes; I got so caught up in the narrative of Underground that I read it in one sitting. As Lynda Grace Philippsen said in her review in the Globe and Mail (April 11), “Hutton’s prose is taut and lean, elegant and poetic….” This is not a long book, but it covers two decades, two wars, numerous settings, and scenes that flash back to the past, and leap ahead.
The story literally explodes onto the page as the protagonist, Al Fraser, is hit by a shell blast and buried alive: He doesn’t hear a sound, not a thing. His hands are still clutching his boot when the cold air becomes an oven, hot breath roars into his ears. A heavy hand clamps onto his skull and flings him up into folds of hot air, each layer hotter than the last. Upside down in that mud sky his guts jam against his lungs, his lungs crush into his throat, while the row of turtle shells below him bursts apart like a broken string of beads. The brown sky balloons and then collapses, hurtles him back to the ground. He falls through the air, past rocks and boots and shells that spin like tops, into the same brown dirt that has lifted him and now, instantly, buries him. The year is 1916, in the Somme.
We next find Al in an English hospital where his legs feel “heavy as tree trunks”. That’s because they are full of shrapnel. The surgeon removes as much as he can, but throughout the story, all the way to its end, pieces of shrapnel rise to the surface of his skin. This serves as a reminder of what Al experienced, while also making the reader question when the next piece will surface. First a lump, then the tip of metal pokes through the skin, and Al digs it out with a knife, as though it is a sliver. Visceral images such as this abound throughout the narrative.
Al worked two years in the coal mines of Nanaimo before lying to get into the Great War at the age of 16, so that he could get away from working underground – ironically, given the opening scene of the novel. From England, he returns home to Princeton, BC. His sister and eventually, his parents die, leaving only brother Jack with his older girlfriend, Agnes, left as family.
A decade later, Al paints houses in the Shaughnessy mansions in Vancouver. He is happily working above ground, and his work is so good, his Italian co-workers call him Michelangelo. Alas, this is not destined to last because now the Great Depression descends, and before long Al is living the life of a hobo on the shores of False Creek. But not for long: in a raid, he and the others are rounded up, and sent to work building a highway not far from Princeton, where Jack and Agnes still live. When the workers go to Vancouver to fight for a better wage than twenty cents a day, Al fights with a policeman, and because he foolishly blurted out his true name, he flees.
Al hides, underground yet again, this time under the streets of Chinatown. With only filtered light during the day, and deep darkness at night, Al relives the horrors of being buried alive, but this time it is told in chilling detail. Still, when the strikers leave for Ottawa and he must leave the tunnels, Al knows he can’t go stay with Jack and Agnes. The only place he can think to go to is north, to the Yukon. His bunkmate, Henderson, at the work camp, had given him a contact. Here Hutton’s personal experience living in Whitehorse at one time, serves her well. I enjoyed reading about the seasonal changes and what it’s like to live in the north.
Given a new last name, Al believes he can start all over. “Alex Johnson had no darkness inside him. Alex Johnson had never been to war.” He gets a passport (stamped Not valid for Spain), and heads to Paris with Henderson. There he sees Picasso’s Guernica, depicting the bombing in the Spanish Civil War. The painting reflects his own experience, and what he has become. He becomes one of the 1700 Canadians to volunteer to fight in this war.
And so begins the final detailed section of the narrative, where fighting in this war is not what Al expected, but neither had he expected to find love.
The last jump in time is almost four decades, and is covered in a mere eight pages. I wish it could have been fifty pages long. I wanted to know more about Al and his new life. But perhaps that is just me. As it is, I did turn the last page with a tear in my eye. And that counts for a lot.
January 9, 2009
This is a terrific debut novel by Canadian June Hutton. Check out the description and zingy trailer at http://www.cormorantbooks.com/titles/... Highly recommended!
June 28, 2018
Afterdamp, n, choking gas, rich in carbon monoxide, left after an explosion of firedamp in a mine.
In many ways, June Hutton's novel Underground is a novel about afterdamp. In fact, "The Afterdamp" is the title of the 1st part of the novel. Albert Fraser is a soldier serving with Canadian forces at the Battle of the Somme in 1916. That acts as a brief prologue and to establish what Fraser has to overcome in a novel dealing with the horrific effects of war on the human spirit. At the Somme Fraser is blown up, an explosion buries him underground. He survives, his lungs coated with dirt and his body filled with shrapnel which migrates over the years to pop out from under the skin at times, another evocation of emerging from underground. Mentally he's haunted by what he's seen and experienced.
Fraser's recovery is framed by 2 wars. Hutton uses the time between to show him caught up in the history and social movements we associate with the 20s and 30s. Returned home to British Columbia, he finds himself seduced by the left-leaning labor activism surrounding the coal industry. Though he'd not been able to return to his prewar job underground in the mines, he joins the campaign for better conditions and wages. He manages to get into enough trouble with the authorities that he has to hide underground for months beneath the streets of Vancouver, a development allowing us to see the interesting dual nature of underground as a place of safety as well as danger. The Depression years and their forcing him into a vagrant life alongside so many others is another form of underground. Still on the run from the Vancouver police, he joins the leftist elements volunteering to fight for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. And it's there, under another name and under an ever-bright Spanish sun that Fraser begins to rise, Lazarus-like, from his afterdamp.
It might appear that I've given away much, but this is a novel busy with many more events and rich characterizations. I've suggested a long recovery and used that word, but I don't want to give the impression of a dark story of Fraser's psychological interior. It's not that. To me it's a kind of adventure novel, a novel of a journey toward being whole. It's a journey encompassing a Great War battlefield, all of western Canada, a trapper's life in what's left of the frontier, hobo towns, parts of Europe, and the dusty battlefields of Spain where fascists and communists struggle for the ideological soul of the country and the century. It's a novel in which June Hutton uses the many images of what's under us--mines, storm drains, mud, migrating shrapnel--to show how it all haunts the life of one man.
In many ways, June Hutton's novel Underground is a novel about afterdamp. In fact, "The Afterdamp" is the title of the 1st part of the novel. Albert Fraser is a soldier serving with Canadian forces at the Battle of the Somme in 1916. That acts as a brief prologue and to establish what Fraser has to overcome in a novel dealing with the horrific effects of war on the human spirit. At the Somme Fraser is blown up, an explosion buries him underground. He survives, his lungs coated with dirt and his body filled with shrapnel which migrates over the years to pop out from under the skin at times, another evocation of emerging from underground. Mentally he's haunted by what he's seen and experienced.
Fraser's recovery is framed by 2 wars. Hutton uses the time between to show him caught up in the history and social movements we associate with the 20s and 30s. Returned home to British Columbia, he finds himself seduced by the left-leaning labor activism surrounding the coal industry. Though he'd not been able to return to his prewar job underground in the mines, he joins the campaign for better conditions and wages. He manages to get into enough trouble with the authorities that he has to hide underground for months beneath the streets of Vancouver, a development allowing us to see the interesting dual nature of underground as a place of safety as well as danger. The Depression years and their forcing him into a vagrant life alongside so many others is another form of underground. Still on the run from the Vancouver police, he joins the leftist elements volunteering to fight for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. And it's there, under another name and under an ever-bright Spanish sun that Fraser begins to rise, Lazarus-like, from his afterdamp.
It might appear that I've given away much, but this is a novel busy with many more events and rich characterizations. I've suggested a long recovery and used that word, but I don't want to give the impression of a dark story of Fraser's psychological interior. It's not that. To me it's a kind of adventure novel, a novel of a journey toward being whole. It's a journey encompassing a Great War battlefield, all of western Canada, a trapper's life in what's left of the frontier, hobo towns, parts of Europe, and the dusty battlefields of Spain where fascists and communists struggle for the ideological soul of the country and the century. It's a novel in which June Hutton uses the many images of what's under us--mines, storm drains, mud, migrating shrapnel--to show how it all haunts the life of one man.
June 11, 2023
1.7⭐️ I loved the cover and I thought would be a good underrated book but … boring at the begging, I could not understand the writing many times ( too fancy instead of accessible) and NOOoO wtf was the whole romance with the cousin????? Nope!
July 17, 2024
DNF unfortunately. I really wanted to like this but I couldn’t get into the story :(
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February 16, 2016First Line: A mud sky churns over a mud field broken by coils of barbed wire, a wheel severed from a cart, a tangle of brown limbs.
Underground by June Hutton is a compelling novel about one man 19s journey to rediscover and redefine himself after a set of devastating experiences in World War I.
Al Fraser volunteered for war. He finds himself in a trench on the front line of a battle in Somme. Before long he is struck down by an explosion that buries him alive in the mud and muck. He manages to climb out and survives, shell-shocked and riddled with shrapnel. When physically able, he is returned home to British Columbia a lost soul, broken and desperate to overcome the horrors in his mind. Somehow, he must create a new life for himself.
Life is hard and his family poor. He finds work as a painter of ceilings for the homes of the affluent. But luck runs out when is engulfed by the desperation of the Great Depression and is forced to live as a hobo. He finds himself in a bit of trouble with the law and travels to northern Canada where he finds home and love for a while. But something inside of him demands that he fight again in order to fully heal, and Al soon volunteers to fight again in the Spanish Civil War.
The prose is intuitive, discerning, and often gut-wrenching. The story has a very realistic and eerie feel to it because it is based on June Hutton 19s own grandfather who actually suffered the protaganist 19s fate in the battle at Somme, and to some extent, thereafter. It is a compelling tale of one man 19s journey of self-discovery through pain, love, war, and hardship. And for a debut novel, it 19s incredibly engrossing.
Underground by June Hutton is a compelling novel about one man 19s journey to rediscover and redefine himself after a set of devastating experiences in World War I.
Al Fraser volunteered for war. He finds himself in a trench on the front line of a battle in Somme. Before long he is struck down by an explosion that buries him alive in the mud and muck. He manages to climb out and survives, shell-shocked and riddled with shrapnel. When physically able, he is returned home to British Columbia a lost soul, broken and desperate to overcome the horrors in his mind. Somehow, he must create a new life for himself.
Life is hard and his family poor. He finds work as a painter of ceilings for the homes of the affluent. But luck runs out when is engulfed by the desperation of the Great Depression and is forced to live as a hobo. He finds himself in a bit of trouble with the law and travels to northern Canada where he finds home and love for a while. But something inside of him demands that he fight again in order to fully heal, and Al soon volunteers to fight again in the Spanish Civil War.
The prose is intuitive, discerning, and often gut-wrenching. The story has a very realistic and eerie feel to it because it is based on June Hutton 19s own grandfather who actually suffered the protaganist 19s fate in the battle at Somme, and to some extent, thereafter. It is a compelling tale of one man 19s journey of self-discovery through pain, love, war, and hardship. And for a debut novel, it 19s incredibly engrossing.
November 17, 2014
June Hutton is a master storyteller. She weaves words with such precision and poetry I could almost taste it. It's rare to see such class-act writing these days, but Hutton is the real deal. Amazing read
June 15, 2014
A soldier comes back from the trenches of WW1 and has trouble adjusting to life. Various adventures in Canada before he reruns to Europe to fight in the Spanish Civil War and try to process his earlier experiences.
May 27, 2009
I really enjoyed this book. I loved the story line, which kept me interested and the writing is very beautiful.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews