Cloudsplitter

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Summary: Powerful compelling reading!
Review: Those fascinated with the Civil War such as I am and those who just want to read a meaty, richly-detailed novel will both find satisfaction in Cloudsplitter. I found this novel took a lot of careful reading to make sure that all of the details fit together. However, the reward in the rich writing style, intense characterizations and constantly flowing action is well worth the effort. I found it hard to remember that this was actually a fictionalized story. It reads as a powerful and believeable book of self-told history. The details relating to lifestyle, physical places and the everyday life of the characters of the book ring true to time and place. Even though anyone who knows some Civil War history knows exactly the outcome, the book holds your interest until the very last page. Not light reading, Cloudsplitter requires a commitment to spending a fair number of hours with this masterfully written story.

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Summary: John Brown's Body
Review: 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!

Rating:
Summary: Interesting story, but tedious.
Review: The first 3/4 of this book could benefit from editing to about half-length. I wonder, why the title of Cloudsplitter? Sure, it was refered to several times, but was in no way relevant to the story, nor involved in any part.

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Summary: Russell Banks confronts the Old Man lying in the grave.
Review: Russell Banks, whose novels are set in the Adirondack Mountains where he lives, now takes on the life of John Brown, whose grave lies close to his residence. Telling the story through Brown's son, Owen, years after the famous invasion on Harper's Ferry, Banks gives a tale of fact mixed with fiction and speculation. Owen tells of a man devoted to the ending of slavery, and to an unyielding God, and how this affected his family. Though Browns exploits are described, Banks is not intending this to be a book of history. Like many historical fiction novels, Banks focuses on what might have been, based on letters and stories of fact. Like most of his narrators, Banks' Owen has somewhat of an ambivalence toward the events of his life. He feels guilty becouse he survived the invasion, and escaped prosecution. He tells of sexual frustration, and his inabilty to accept his father's religious convictions. In Cloudspltter, Mr. Banks has given his readers an interesting perspe! ctive on how a all encomapssing athourity figure leaves those under him unable to get a solid grasp on thier own identity.

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Summary: This book needs an editor.
Review: Somewhere in here is a story...but the author repeats the same material so many times one becomes frustrated and bored. I'm finishing it only as a matter of principle. Suffering is character building they say.

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Summary: The making of a terrorist
Review: This book has many virtues: it's a wonderful evocation of 19th century rural life and it depicts vividly the tension and danger faced by escaping slaves and their conductors on the difficult Adirondack route of the Underground Railroad. However it's central interest lies in the way Banks gets into the mind of John Brown as developing terrorist, showing us how, for some people of high principle, only violence, in the end, will suffice. One can't help reading this novel with the events of the twentieth century in mind.

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Summary: An enigmatic historical figure brought to life
Review: Was John Brown insane or a visionary zealot? This is the question that runs through Russell Banks lengthy novel. Historians have debated this for years but hearing the account from Brown's son, Owen, allbeit in a fictional account seems to settle the issue.

In this wonderful novel Owen Brown wrestles the ghosts from his past some 50 years after the facts. While the events are taking place Owen himself is not sure if his father is a madman or not. We however have the luxury of hindsight and can see what a catalyst John Brown was in resolving the question of slavery. Banks does an incredible job of putting the reader in the mindset of the people living this era. Back when the outcome was far from certain. John Brown comes across not as a madman with half-baked ideas but as someone who early on recognized slavery for the absolute evil it was and more importantly knew what it would take to end it. A fierce conflagration that Northern whites would not be able to avoid. Taking it from the discussion tables and parlors to the battlefield where it would be settled once and for all.

The book was somewhat lengthy and I would have preferred more on the later days of Brown. The raid itself and subsequent executions. But it is a wonderful read both as a work of fiction and an historical insight into one of the most fascinating figures in American history

Rating:
Summary: Splendid
Review: I enjoyed this book thoroughly, despite some historical inaccuracies. As Banks plainly states, the book is a novel. It is not meant to be painfully accurate history as to detail. However, it is certainly accurate history as to spirit. Another excellent book for people interested in John Brown, a non-fiction work that reads like a novel, is Ed Renehan's THE SECRET SIX: THE TRUE TALE OF THE MEN WHO CONSPIRED WITH JOHN BROWN. As Allen D. Boyer wrote in the Sunday New York Times Book Review, THE SECRET SIX "is a spellbinding study in revolution from the top down -- gaslit opulence with tense whispers from the sidelines." I note that the Amazon.com URL for this title is -- Sam Blankenship

Rating:
Summary: another (male) attempt at the GAN
Review: We've read a lot in Salon recently about the GAN, the canon, and the relative merits of writers of both sexes. Here's Russell Banks' take on the GAN--and it has everything that the Dead White Male school of criticism wants to see--war, blood, death, history, issues--men in action! In its favor: the passion, historical and literary, of John Brown is real and can't be denied. How many people of any sex, race, or background at that time in history can claim his passion? This is a strong initial character for a novel. And Banks, by focusing on the son Owen, who is quite simply a killer, puts the father's (or patriarch's) persona in sharp relief. But, but, but: this is the Male (cap M) novel par excellence. Nowhere is there to be found any record of how, if, or when any characters of the female persuasion may have had any--even bedroom (and let's face it, John Brown got a lot of marital bedroom action)--say in the thinking, strategy, or even day-to-day herstory of the events depicted. We learn a lot about the angst of Owen but nothing of the broader palette of his story, none of the African-American point of view, none of the Native American, nothing gendered, nothing even of the opposing "Satanic" character of the pro-slavery advocates. So, my verdict: all 3 stars go to John Brown and his transcendental passion for freedom--about which I learned a lot from this book, albeit a novel; 0 stars to the framing, development, characters, ambiance, and mise-en-scene of the book as a novel.

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Summary: An intimate history
Review: Cloudsplitter, Russell Banks' new novel about famed abolitionist John Brown, as narrated by his third son, Owen, presents vividly the increasing frustration and desperation of the grassroots anti-slavery movement of the era; while giving a beautifully bittersweet portrait of American domestic life in the early-to-mid part of the 19th century. Brown is alternately the stern, domineering Old Testament authoritarian and the nurturing family patriarch. He is chronically torn between the financial demands of raising his ever growing flock of children, and his devotion to the heroic principle of eradicating the scourge of slavery through any means possible-as soon as possible.

After working variously as a tanner of animal hides, then in land speculation, and as a purveyor in the wool trade, Brown's internal conflict between his desire to succeed in business and his commitment to social activism eventually comes to a head with his failure to realize a much anticipated great profit from the sale of American wool while on an overseas journey to England with son Owen. This trip also takes them to the Continent, to Waterloo, accompanied by an interesting analysis by Brown of Napoleon's strategic mistakes and legendarily humiliating defeat-obviously not something Brown ever expected for himself. On the home front, Brown's life is both blessed by his many children and cursed by the sorrowfully premature deaths of some--no doubt a common occurrence in 19th century rural life. Through all of this however, Brown maintains his absolute faith in the God, while Owen, though denying this faith in his own life, nevertheless becomes his father's greatest family ally in the fight to free the slaves.

Banks authoritatively makes key historic figures in the anti-slavery movement come to life, from the sublime philosophizing of Ralph Waldo Emerson to the formidable leadership of Frederick Douglass (according to Banks, Douglass was a close friend and confidante to Brown, "abandoning" him just weeks p! rior to the Harpers Ferry debacle, judging his proposed insurrection to be the unworkable scheme it turned out to be). Along the way, he courts the wealthy Beacon Hill dilettantes, accepting their sizable donations while denouncing their lip service, though sincere, to the cause.

This book, criticized as a little overly long (not entirely unfairly), is best appreciated for the attention given to the small details: the day-to-day existence among homesteaders on the American frontier-both whites and freed slaves; the heated passions of abolitionists and pro-slavers alike; and the treacherous paths of those escaping slavery to Canada; and how the forces of nature, both brutal and serene-shaped their various journeys by land and by sea.