Cloudsplitter (Turtleback)

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.

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"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

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This book, in my opinion, puts to question the entire field of biography, historical writing, and questions of truth. Through the eyes of one of Brown's sons, Banks reconstructs the world of abolition and frontiersmen with more delicacy, verve and passion that a handful of professional historians could compile. By making the narrative of the story the mind of one of it's primary actors, Banks accesses authenticity with an ingenuity unseen in standard biography. Because he is a writer of fiction, Banks is more likely to manage the psychological, sociological, and cultural complexities of a given moment than academics, simply because he knows that lives are not made up of moments at Harper's Ferry; rather, lives are comprised by the internal contemplations and arguments we have with the world. The resultant actions are always caricatures of such imaginations. Kudos to Banks for doing the research, and refusing to allow it to force his hand into the drawing of cartoons.

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