Cloudsplitter (Paperback)

The cover of Russell Banks' mountain-sized novel Cloudsplitter features an actual photo of Owen Brown, the son of John Brown, hero of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic". His terrorist band murdered proponents of slavery in Kansas and attacked Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859 on what he considered direct orders from God, helping spark the American Civil War.

A heavily researched but fictionalised Owen narrates this remarkably realistic and ambitious novel by the distinguished author ofThe Sweet Hereafter. Owen is an atheist, but he is as dominated by his father, John Brown, as John was haunted by the angry God who demanded human sacrifice to stop the abomination of slavery.

Cloudsplitter takes you along on John Brown's journey-- as period-perfect as that of the Civil War deserter in Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain--from Brown's cabin facing the great Adirondack mountain (whose Native American name is "Cloudsplitter"), amid an abolitionist settlement called "Timbuctoo", to the various perilous stops of the Underground Railroad spiriting slaves out of the South, and finally to the killings in Bloody Kansas and the Harpers Ferry revolt. We meet some great names--Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson and a (fictional) lover of Nathaniel Hawthorne--but the vast book keeps a tight focus on the aged Owen's obsessive recollections of his Pa's crusade and the emotional shackles John clamped on his own family.

Banks, a white author, has tackled the topic of race as impressively as Toni Morrison does in earlier novels such as Continental Drift. What makes Cloudsplitter a departure for him is its style and scope. He is noted as an exceptionally thorough chronicler of today's USA in rigorously detailed realist fiction such as David Guterson's Snow Falling on Cedars) which Banks championed. Banks spent half a decade researching Cloudsplitter, and he renounces the conventional magic of his poetical prose style for a voice steeped in the King James Bible and the stately cadences of 19th-century political rhetoric. The tone is closer to Ken Burns' tragic, elegiac The Civil War than to Bruce Olds' recent crazy-quilt modernist novel about John Brown, Raising Holy Hell.

A fan of Banks' more cut-to-the-chase, Hollywood- hot modern style may get impatient, but such readers can turn to, say, Gore Vidal's reissued Lincoln, which peeks into the Great Emancipator's head with a modern's cynical wit. Banks' narrator is poetical and witty at times: Owen notes, "The outrage felt by whites [over slavery] was mostly spent on stoking their own righteousness and warming themselves before its fire." Yet in the main, Banks writes in the "elaborately plainspoken" manner of the Browns, restricting himself to a sober style dictated by the historical subject.

John Brown's head resembles the stone tablets of Moses. You do not penetrate him, and you cannot declare him mad or sane, good or evil. You read, struggling to locate the words emanating from some strange place between history, heaven and hell. --Tim Appelo

This is one of the great epics of contemporary US literature, a vast sweep of history distilled through the weird but powerful vision of one man, one of the mythic characters of US history - John Brown. Brown was an Old Testament figure, a huge, raw, charismatic man of implacable beliefs. Although an abject failure in such mundane activities as business, he inspired all who followed him, particularly his vast family. Holed up in a failing farm in the northern mountains, he became a vital link in the underground railway which spirited slaves away from the South. When Kansas became the focus of the conflict between the free North and the slaveholding South, Brown went there with his sons and rampaged through the state with a terrible violence. Finally, unshakeably convinced of his own rightness, he led a motley bunch of followers to take over the arsenal at Harper's Ferry and launch a slave revolt. The revolt never happened; Brown and his followers were killed or captured and executed. But he had set light to the fuse that would ignite the Civil War. His story, one of the most mysterious and yet important stories in the whole bloody history of 19th-century America, is told here by his son looking back on his own life from lonely old age for the benefit of Brown's biographer. The results is a monumental novel that captures the attention and doesn't once let go through all the sprawling, mad, awe-inspiring events that follow. A great US novelist has found a great US subject: the result is spectacular. (Kirkus UK)

An inordinately ambitious portrayal of the life and mission of abolitionist John Brown, from the veteran novelist whose previous fictional forays into American history include The New Worm (1978) and The Relation of My Imprisonment (not reviewed). Banks's story takes the form of a series of lengthy letters written, 40 years after Brown's execution, by his surviving son Owen in response to the request of a professor (himself a descendant of William Lloyd Garrison) who is planning a biography of the antislavery martyr. Owen's elaborate tale, frequently interrupted by digressive analyses of his own conflicted feelings about his family's enlistment in their father's cause, traces a pattern of family losses and business failings that seemed only to heighten "the Old Man's" fervent belief that he had been chosen by God to lead the slaves to freedom. As we observe the increasingly wrathful actions of Brown, his sons, and his followers, Banks patiently reveals and explores the motivations that will lead to their involvement with the Underground Railroad, the bloody slaughter (by Brown's self-proclaimed "Army of the North") of "pro-slave settlers" in Kansas, and finally the fateful attack on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry. In many ways, this is very impressive fiction - obviously a painstakingly researched one, with a genuine understanding of both the particulars and the attitudes of its period. The slowly building indirect characterization of "Father Abraham, making his terrible, final sacrifice to his God" has some power. But Owen's redundant agonies of conscience (especially regarding his sexual naivete) grow tiresome, and the novel is enormously overlong (e.g., Banks gives us the full nine-page text of a sermon Brown preaches, comparing himself to Job). Cloudsplitter will undoubtedly be much admired. But it penetrates less convincingly into the enigma of John Brown than did a novel half its length, Leonard Ehrlich's God's Angry Man, published 60 years ago. Once again, sadly, Banks's reach has exceeded his grasp. (Kirkus Reviews)