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
Cloudsplitter is the Native American name for the mountain that looms over the John Brown farmstead in New York. It might also describe the force that John Brown brought to the abolitionist movement. Those of use who know Brown only from Harper's Ferry will be enlightened. Banks looks at Brown through the eyes of Brown's third son, Owen. Owen looks back on his father's life and recalls the complex road, convictions of the heart, and religious fervor that led to the violence in Kansas and Harper's Ferry. Owen explores his own difficult relationship with his resolute and zealous parent. Brown's opposition to slavery is absolute, but his son is not certain what his own path should be. Owen strains against his own awareness of racism and the stern expectations of his father. This fictional account is informed by much historical research. The narrative brings to life this enigmatic and controversial figure in American history. George DelHoyo offers an excellent reading, bringing the necessary sobriety to Banks's carefully crafted prose. This is a worthy purchase for any library.ANancy Paul, Brandon P.L., WICopyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The Atlantic Monthly, James M. McPherson
[There are] powerful passages and profound insights in this novel. It humanizes John Brown, a figure all too often demonized or idolized in history as well as in fiction. Our understanding of this tragic era in the American experience will never be quite the same again.

The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani
...Cloudsplitter makes for some highly entertaining--and at times, deeply affecting--reading.

The Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review, Henry Mayer
...a daring, though not entirely successful, blend of adventure and rumination that combines melodramatic fugitive slave chases in the stirring tradition of Uncle Tom's Cabin with the sullen father-son combat of Long Day's Journey into Night.... Cloudsplitter is a vibrant, outsized, mesmerizing portrait of the mercurial Brown that reveals his charm as well as his piety, his compassion as well as his demonic wrath, his intellect as well as his willfulness.

From AudioFile
The self-conscious, unsure son of abolitionist John Brown tells his story in a novel of racial and generational conflict. The young man wrestles with slavery, his fanatical father, his hormones and his God all at the same time and even manages some inspiring victories. Gravelly voiced George DelHoyo gives a great deal of soul to the hero and a feeling of authenticity to his other characterizations as well. Listeners need to exercise a little patience because DelHoyo takes his time entering the world of the novel. He grows into his character slowly as he reads, so that his performance on the last side of these cassettes is far richer than on the first. Fortunately, the author's evocative writing carries him until he reaches cruising speed. Y.R. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine

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.

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
March 1998

Abolitionist John Brown, who some historians believe was a pivotal instigator of the Civil War, is at the center of Russell Banks's latest novel, Cloudsplitter. Deeply researched and peopled with a cast of characters both historical and wholly invented, Cloudsplitter evocatively brings to life the story of a devoutly religious and devoted family man, whose unbridled wrath over the immorality of slavery helped shape the course of historical events in his lifetime and well beyond.

Owen Brown, the only son of John to survive the Harper's Ferry raid, narrates the tale. At the request of a John Brown biographer, Owen — who, guilt-ridden and fiercely resentful, is living out his days as a virtual hermit in the hills of southern California — reluctantly relives his childhood and early manhood at the side of his now legendary father. Through Owen's recollections, John Brown is revealed to be a deeply flawed and stubborn man rather than the god history has chosen to memorialize.

From the raw material of history and his own prodigious artistic imagination, Banks deftly molds a compelling and heartbreaking story out of the shadowy fragments of one family's life. An all-too-often-forgotten event from the annals of American history is brought to life in Banks's climactic description of the slave insurrection at Harper's Ferry — a worthwhile read.

ANNOTATION

Winner of the 1999 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

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. Cloudsplitter vividly re-creates the antislavery movement of the 1840s and traces it through the brutal guerrilla warfare of Bloody Kansas, culminating in a powerful recreation of Brown's insurrectionary raid on Harpers Ferry. Cloudsplitter is a moving account of one principled man's tragic passage from anti-slavery agitator and activist to guerrilla fighter to terrorist to martyr. It is the story of how a political cause deemed holy controlled and ultimately destroyed the life of an entire family, and how in the process it became the catalyst for the greatest conflagration in our nation's history. John Brown, as portrayed by his ambivalent, reflective, guilt-ridden son Owen, begins as a conventional middle-class Christian family man of his time, a Yankee tanner, a failed wholesaler of wool, a small farmer and inept land speculator. Yet by middle age he exists at the precise locus where the exalted sentiments of his fellow abolitionists, the New England Transcendentalists such as Emerson and Thoreau, cross over into revolutionary action. He has become the trusted cohort of African-Americans like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, the leader of a zealous band of anti-slavery terrorists, and the creator of the most daring, radical plan to free the slaves ever imagined. Historians have long argued whether Brown was a religious fanatic or merely a horse-stealing charlatan or the only important white martyr in the history of racial conflict in America - or all three. What cannot be argued is that the course of the Civil War and all subsequent American history would have been radically altered if not for John Brown's 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry.

SYNOPSIS

From a hermit's shack on an isolated California mountaintop, Owen Brown, the only surviving son of abolitionist John Brown, reminisces over his role in his father's bloody crusade -- from maintaining the Underground Railroad in upstate New York to battling proslavery settlers in Kansas to the fateful raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry. Massive in scope and brimming with love, hatred, revenge, and unbridled ego, Cloudsplitter is a dazzling re-creation of the political and social landscape of America in the years before the Civil War.

FROM THE CRITICS

USA Today

Russell Banks' remarkable Cloudsplitter brings Brown back to life, not to teach history, but as the narrator of a morally questioning novel about fathers and sons and fanaticism and how madness is measured when the sane have fled....morally questioning...

Time Magazine

Cloudsplitter is surely his best novel.

Playboy Magazine

Powerfully told....A long meditation on America's shameful enslavement of four million people....It is also a captivating portrait of a 19th-century family.

San Francisco Chronicle

Ambitious and haunting....a valuable novel about a significant American.

NY Times Book Review

Of the many writers working in the tradition today, one of the best is Russell Banks....rich and soulful.Read all 17 "From The Critics" >

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

Russell Banks' work presents without falsehood and with a tough affection the uncompromising moral voice of our time. You find the craziness of false dreams, the political inequalities, and somehow the sliver of redemption. I trust his portrait of America more than any other--the burden of it, the need for it, the hell of it. -- Author of The English Patient — Harper Collins - New Media