Cloudsplitter

Making a case that long novels by definition are not necessarily flabby, Banks' opus, perhaps his best novel, reaches deeply into its subject matter, but with clean, tight, stunning results. A historical novel by classification, this one becomes, in addition, a profound novel of psychology. It focuses on the life of John Brown, the infamous abolitionist whose notorious 1859 raid on Harper's Ferry, Virginia, led to his execution. The vehicle by which Banks so thoroughly and engagingly reconstructs Brown's leadership of his antislavery band and their increasingly drastic actions ("Our specialty would be killing men who wished to own other men") is having Brown's third son, Owen, relate it all in his own intimate, felicitous fashion to a historian years after the fact. What is so dramatically revealed by this technique is how Brown brought up his children to be his followers ("It was his gentleness, not his huge, male ferocity, that gathered us in and kept us there"). The reader sees less a madman in Brown than an ardent self-believer, and what the reader sees in author Banks is a sensitive comprehension of Brown, about whom Owen says, "Nothing human beings did with or to one another or themselves shocked him. Only slavery shocked him." Much more straightforward and less impressionistic than Bruce Olds' novel about John Brown, Raising Holy Hell (1995)--but no less effective; expect high demand from Banks' fans as well as lovers of historical fiction. --Brad Hooper

Like Bruce Olds's recent Raising Holy Hell (LJ 6/15/96), this new novel from award winner Banks re-creates the life of John Brown. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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 Worm (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 naivetâ) 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 ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.