Seldom in American history have the actions of one man had so great an impact on human events as did those of John Brown, the famous Abolitionist. Russel Banks' epic novel, Cloudsplitter, recounts the life and times of the enigmatic man who changed the course of a nation. The author imagines John Brown's last-surviving son, an aged Owen Brown, who narrates the story and fills in many historical gaps that still surround the juggernaut unleashed by his fanatical father. The real Owen Brown remains a vague footnote in history. Although he occasionally surfaces like an apparition in some John Brown biographies, Russel Banks takes advantage of this particular gap in history to create his own expansive narrator, sometimes verbose and full of remorse, a living paradox racked with guilt and grandiosity. At his best, Owen tells his story with love and devotion and much largesse. Other times, when he is most guilt-ridden and self-absorbed, the narrative bogs down and becomes suffused with rancor and hate. John Brown the stoic patriarch is cast as a savage self-righteous prophet of biblical proportions, and Owen plays a convincing role as the would be son of Abraham.John Brown was the scourge of "Bleeding Kansas" (Osawatomie Brown) and the martyr of Harpers Ferry (Butcher Brown) but to Banks' Owen Brown, he was also a failed farmer and often made bankrupt by dreams of get-rich schemes. For Owen, in the end, he was a brutal father who destroyed his own family for the sake of the anti-slavery cause. Absolutely nothing stood between John Brown and his God.John Brown died that the slaves might be free...He sired twenty children, but only half lived to be adults, and three of those were killed in his Kansas and Virginia campaigns. With the blessing of Abraham Lincoln, under the command of Robert E. Lee, John Brown was hung in Charleston in 1859.Ironically, John Brown's execution brought together three of the most extraordinary characters in American history. Besides the old zealot himself, there was the marine colonel in charge of the affair, Robert E. Lee, who would later lead the Confederate armies against the Union, and a federal militiaman named John Wilkes Booth, who six years later as a famous actor would perform the last tragic act of the Civil War. Henry David Thoreau compared John Brown's martyrdom to that of Christ. "Some eighteen hundred years ago Christ was crucified; this morning, perchance, Captain Brown was hung. These are the two ends of a chain that is not without its links."And Ralph Waldo Emerson promised that Brown's martyrdom would "make the gallows glorious like the cross."And his soul goes marching on...As Owen tells it, John Brown was consumed by divine wrath. "The man had read every word of his Bible hundreds of times; nothing human beings did with or to one another or themselves shocked him. Only slavery shocked him." From the Ten Commandments, John Brown cobbled together a single imperative that southerners would come to loath: Thou shalt not enslave another human being. John Brown planned his assault on slavery from the high moral ground of the Adirondack Mountains, at the foot of a peak called "Cloudsplitter". His dream was to stretch the Underground Railroad from Alabama to the Canadian border and to eventually crush the Slavocracy through mass insurrection and economic ruin. The raid on Harpers Ferry, the climax of Banks' story (or anticlimax of Owen's) was meant to trigger that insurrection. But the raid failed terribly and resulted only in the capture of the great emancipator himself. What it did trigger, though, was the Civil War. Cloudsplitter is well researched and masterfully written. It is Russel Banks' best effort since Continental Drift (1993). This imaginative, ambitious novel humanizes the legend of John Brown much the way Bruce Olds did in his remarkable first novel, Raising Holy Hell (1995). But even in death, John Brown's juggernaut could not be stopped, and seldom in American history have the actions of one man had so great an impact on human events.Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Russell Banks is a wonder to the literary world! Here we have a man who has invested so much of his time to give a fictionalized account of the life of martyr John Brown and his mysterious son Owen. Banks spent years learning the history of this historic family, and before creating his fictionalized version, he spent a cold winter in the mountains near the location of the Brown Family for many years.

Banks loves to play around with the ideas of truth vs fact, insanity vs sanity, private life vs public scrutiny, and more than anything else, the relationship between father and son. His recreation of the mythical John Brown seems almost too real for comfort, and the imaginative birth of the historically allusive Owen Brown is likewise worthy of praise.

Cloudsplitter is a book of biblical proportions, existing on multiple levels and asking a reader to do, what in today's standards is virtually unheard of, stick with him through the short of 800 page novel. Not many today have what it takes to embark such a monumental effort as Banks has, and his merits are his rewards. This book belongs on your shelves, next to Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath" and snuggled up beside James's "The American" for this truly is American Fiction at its most prolific best. It is one for the ages, and Banks can sleep soundly at night, he has done no injustice to John Brown nor the world for bringing such a wonderfully spun tale to life.

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.