Product Description

A triumph of the imagination and a masterpiece of modern storytelling, Cloudsplitter is narrated by the enigmatic Owen Brown, last surviving son of America's most famous and still controversial political terrorist and martyr, John Brown. Deeply researched, brilliantlyplotted, and peopled with a cast of unforgettable characters both historical and wholly invented, Cloudsplitter is dazzling in its re-creation of the political and social landscape of our history during the years before the Civil War, when slavery was tearing the country apart.But within this broader scope, Russell Banks has given us a riveting, suspenseful, heartbreaking narrative filled with intimate scenes of domestic life, of violence and action in battle, of romance and familial life and death that make the reader feel in astonishing ways what it is like to be alive in that time.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #243317 in Books
• Published on: 1999-02-01
• Released on: 1999-01-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 768 pages

Amazon.com Review
The cover of Russell Banks's mountain-sized novel Cloudsplitter features an actual photo of Owen Brown, the son of John Brown--the hero of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" whose 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 Civil War.

A deeply researched but fictionalized Owen narrates this remarkably realistic and ambitious novel by the already distinguished author of The Sweet Hereafter. Owen is an atheist, but he is as haunted and dominated by his father, John Brown, as John was haunted by an 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 Cold Mountain--from Brown's cabin facing the great Adirondack mountain (called "the Cloudsplitter" by the Indians) amid an abolitionist settlement the blacks there call "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 in 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 America today in rigorously detailed realist fiction (he championed Snow Falling on Cedars). 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's tragic, elegiac The Civil War than to the recent crazy-quilt modernist novel about John Brown, Raising Holy Hell.

A fan of Banks's more cut-to-the-chase, Hollywood-hot modern style may get impatient, but such readers can turn to, say, Gore Vidal's recently reissued Lincoln, which peeks into the Great Emancipator's head with a modern's cynical wit. Banks's 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.

Besides, John Brown's head resembles the stone tablets of Moses. You do not penetrate him, and you can't 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.

From Library Journal
At first glance, aside from the setting, this massive novelized life of Abolitionist John Brown, told from the viewpoint of one of his sons, has nothing in common with Banks's book of outlaw excess, Rule of the Bone (HarperCollins, 1995). Yet both deal with single-mindedness, rebellion, and codes?except that Brown's versions of these are more honorable (he would have agreed with Dylan that "to live outside the law you must be honest"). This book has all the stark beauty of the Adirondacks setting and of Brown's religion, and the elderly, reclusive narrator's coming to terms with himself and his father is an achievement in its own right. Besides, like the works of Thomas Mallon and Thomas Gifford, this is not just a fine novel (and a wonderfully structured one at that) but a way to participate in history. Recommended, without hyperbole, for all collections.
-?Robert E. Brown, Onondaga Cty. P.L., Oswego, N.Y.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
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 World (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 naivet‚) 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. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Customer Reviews

Ambitious
A thoroughly meticulously and hugely ambitious telling of John Brown's life, culminating in the bloody rebellion at Harper's Ferry.

Russell Banks strays from his normal storytelling formula in Cloudsplitter; this novel reads like a well researched piece of historical fiction. Banks concentrates not only on capturing the characters with accuracy and depth (which he accomplishes here as in his other novels) but also on painting the mood and character of the time itself. This is the story not only of Owen and John Brown, but of pre-Civil War America itself.

At 758 pages it isn't a quick read, and the characters develop more slowly than they do in his other novels, but I never found the book to be needlessly verbose. We get a picture of John Brown that is comprehensive and complete, warts and all. And we also get an interesting look at the institution of chattel slavery in the United States, its crushing effectiveness, and the racial norms of the time.

Brown is painted as a man of principle, but a fanatic nonetheless. His power over his small band of followers is based largely on his overwhelming charisma, not on his vision or his doomed mission. The novel is based on actual events and therefore the reader knows how the action will end before it even begins, but Banks manages to keep the suspense building.

Banks employs some strange tactics in this novel, including a risky "out of body" experience that mixes an element of fantastic into his otherwise literal and meticulous storytelling (you might think you've wandered into a Rushdie or Gabrial Marquez novel). But somehow it all works. In summary: an interesting and challenging novel.

A brilliant, epic novel of deep relevance
I do not like the idea of heros; but Banks is able to humanize his characters so deeply and movingly that there is nothing else to call them. Instead of a vacuous glory like that ascribed to the so-caled founding fathers of the United States in American high school history classrooms, Banks presents us with Owen and John Brown, full of doubts and weaknesses, yet able to achieve amazing ends regardless. For these characters, bravery and integrity means something. For example, much confusion has surrounded the Pottawatomie Massacre carried out by John and Owen; it was a horrible deed, cold, ruthless, and terrorist. It is to Banks' credit that he develops his characters so well that this incident can be dealt with clearly. Reading Cloudsplitter, we can get a picture of how the real occurence might have happened.

Nearly everything about this book hits the mark. It is well-researched (although if you want to know the true history of these stories, you should look elsewhere, since Banks at times diverges from the record). The language Banks uses is appropriate to the subject, as is the epic length and scope of the work. The issues of racism are handled in their unresolved complexity, making the novel eminently useful for those living in the US today. The novel integrates broad, important ideas about spirituality, identity, and power with the emotional and psychological eruptions of all-too human beings in a way that will perhaps make it a classic statement about the human condition.

A meaningful and important book
Russell Banks' Cloudsplitter is an important and engaging work of historical fiction, bringing John Brown and his family to life and exploring a period in American history in which the fate of the young nation truly hung in the balance. Many novels have been written of the Civil War years, by writers such as Jeffrey and Michael Shaara, as well as Charles Frazier. Banks instead brings the turbulent 1850's to life, complete with New England abolitionists, the Underground Railroad, and the political struggles culminating in some dubious "compromises" as more states entered the sharply-divided Union.

The structure of the book is unique, as the novel is comprised of a long narrative by surviving son Owen Brown, his father's right hand man during the years leading up to the deadly raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859. Owen is supposedly gathering his papers and setting forth his story to a fictional "Miss Mayo", who, along with her boss, is working on a definitive biography of John Brown several decades after his death. Owen feels that his father has traditionally been misunderstood, branded an insane terrorist by some and a holy martyr by others, while Owen attempts to humanize him and the rest of the family.

Russell Banks apparently spent years in painstaking research on this book, and you wonder how much of the story is pure fiction, and how much of Owen's narrative is based on historical fact. Of course Banks would likely tell you that such inquiries are besides the point, although I will wonder whether John Brown really did write a Horatio Alger-like pamphlet for African Americans titled "Sambo's Mistakes". I absolutely loved the scene in which John Brown realizes his son Owen has stolen something, and rather than whip the boy the elder Brown makes Owen whip him, as punishment for John Brown's failings as a father which would lead his son to commit such an offense. Heavy stuff indeed.

Many reviewers have commented upon the length of the book, and while the language was never too difficult or tedious to get through, I must admit the Banks takes his time setting up the story, as the pace does not really pick up considerably until about page 400. There are meaningful episodes earlier, including John Brown's efforts to escort espaped slaves to Canada on the Underground Railroad, his family tragedies, and his land speculations and failures. We also see glimpses of other historical figures including Frederick Douglass and Ralph Waldo Emerson, who probably did interact with Brown in some fashion in real life.

Banks moves skillfully toward the climax of the book, throwing in references to future events in "Bloody Kansas" or Harpers Ferry to give the whole book a sense of foreboding. However the ultimate payoff was a little light to me, which is my reservation about giving the book 5 stars. By making surviving son Owen Brown his narrator, and by telling us that Owen's job is not to chronicle historical events (about which much has supposedly been written) but instead to concentrate on personal reminisces, Banks limits himself a bit. By the end, at Harpers Ferry, the reader (at least this reader) wants a little more historical detail than Owen can provide, due to his location and status during the culminating raid. Everybody knows John Brown's fate, but after 740 pages leading up to the great showdown, I wanted a little more than I got, (maybe words to his captors or specific details as to the fates of other members of the party). Ultimately what made the novel effective for the first 7/8ths of the book was the thing that brought the ending down a peg in my estimation.

Anyway, for those like myself who enjoy historical novels and who want to learn more about one of the most notorious and fascinating figures in American history, this is a monumental work. In reading Cloudsplitter, you understand the family dynamics which led Brown's sons to follow him into a maelstrom, you get a glimpse into the belief system of John Brown and his atheist son, and you wait with him for the great slave uprising which he thought would accompany his raid on the federal weapons arsenal at Harpers Ferry, as part of his campaign to rid the nation of the scourge of slavery. I am glad I read Cloudsplitter, but unlike some of my co-reviewers here I sure don't plan on doing it again.