Cloudsplitter [Paperback]

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.

I read a book or two a week, week in, week out. This one stopped me in my tracks. It is densely written, complex, but seemingly infinitely rewarding. It took 6 weeks to do a fast-scan read, but it has paid back as much time as I have been willing to devote to it with level after level of meaning and detail. Even a casual read has changed my entire notion of race, politics, religion, individuality, family, and the nature of the daily struggle for the legal tender. Can't wait for a DETAILED reading.......

I would rank it among the top five or six American novels.....ever: Moby Dick, Sometimes A Great Notion, Gravity's Rainbow.......Infinite Jest?

Banks is a college professor of English......I can easily see a college course built around this book......even a college major. It failed to win the National Book Award a couple of years back.....which tells me more about the judges than this book. That the judges probably thought it too large, too complex, too obscure and too unapproachable has cost it many readers, and caused it to drop from notice........... A real tragedy for our assembled consciousness.

"When we gazed onto the world," abolitionist John Brown's last surviving son, Owen, tells us, "we stood as if on a peak bathed in the bright light of freedom, which enabled us to see the true nature of man, and therefore, simply by following our own true nature, we were able to follow the Lord God Almighty. And after much scrupulous examination, having confidently discerned the Lord's will, we naturally had determined to make all men and women free. If, to accomplish that great task, we must put to death those who would oppose us, then so be it: it is the will of the Lord: and in this time and place, He hath no greater work to set before His children than that they stamp upon the neck of Satan and crack the jaw of his followers and liberate all the white and black children of the Lord from the obscene stink and corruption of slavery. Simply, if we would defeat Satan, we must defeat his most heinous invention, which was American Negro slavery" (p. 567).

In his 758-page narrative, Owen Brown triumphs in revealing the "Secret History" (p. 678) of his father's intriguing life. Through his son's eyes, we learn that John Brown was not only an "abolitionist firebrand," who changed the course of American history by slaughtering proponents of slavery in Kansas and by raiding the federal armory at Harper's Ferry in 1859, but also "a good Christian husband and father, a private man whose most satisfying and important acts were manifested in the visible comfort of his family" (p. 144). "He was a man who had pledged his life to bring about the permanent and complete liberation of the Negroe slaves" (pp. 144-45), Owen tells us. "The Lord speaks to me," his father explained. "He shows me things" (p. 678).

Equally profound, chilling, and entertaining, Banks' historical novel follows "John Brown's little army of the Lord" (p. 570) from "helping Negroes escape from slavery to killing those who would enslave them" (p. 414), against a pre-Civil War portrait charged with the spirit of the times. "It was like a dream, a beautiful, soothing dream of late autumn," Owen recalls, "low, gray skies, smell of woodsmoke, fallen leaves crackling beneath my feet, and somewhere out there, in the farmsteads and plantations ahead of me, swift retribution! Freedom! The bloody work of the Lord!" (p. 451). Banks presents us with a mercurial John Brown, who will leave you long wondering: terrorist or patriot? madman or visionary?

G. Merritt