Cloudsplitter, Vol. 1 FROM OUR EDITORS
The Barnes & Noble Review
March 1998
Abolitionist John Brown, who some historians believe was a pivotal instigator of the Civil War, is at the center of Russell Banks's latest novel, Cloudsplitter. Deeply researched and peopled with a cast of characters both historical and wholly invented, Cloudsplitter evocatively brings to life the story of a devoutly religious and devoted family man, whose unbridled wrath over the immorality of slavery helped shape the course of historical events in his lifetime and well beyond.
Owen Brown, the only son of John to survive the Harper's Ferry raid, narrates the tale. At the request of a John Brown biographer, Owen — who, guilt-ridden and fiercely resentful, is living out his days as a virtual hermit in the hills of southern California — reluctantly relives his childhood and early manhood at the side of his now legendary father. Through Owen's recollections, John Brown is revealed to be a deeply flawed and stubborn man rather than the god history has chosen to memorialize.
From the raw material of history and his own prodigious artistic imagination, Banks deftly molds a compelling and heartbreaking story out of the shadowy fragments of one family's life. An all-too-often-forgotten event from the annals of American history is brought to life in Banks's climactic description of the slave insurrection at Harper's Ferry — a worthwhile read.
ANNOTATION
Winner of the 1999 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.
FROM THE PUBLISHER
Cloudsplitter is narrated by the enigmatic Owen Brown, last surviving son of America's most famous and still controversial political terrorist and martyr, John Brown. Cloudsplitter vividly re-creates the antislavery movement of the 1840s and traces it through the brutal guerrilla warfare of Bloody Kansas, culminating in a powerful recreation of Brown's insurrectionary raid on Harpers Ferry. Cloudsplitter is a moving account of one principled man's tragic passage from anti-slavery agitator and activist to guerrilla fighter to terrorist to martyr. It is the story of how a political cause deemed holy controlled and ultimately destroyed the life of an entire family, and how in the process it became the catalyst for the greatest conflagration in our nation's history. John Brown, as portrayed by his ambivalent, reflective, guilt-ridden son Owen, begins as a conventional middle-class Christian family man of his time, a Yankee tanner, a failed wholesaler of wool, a small farmer and inept land speculator. Yet by middle age he exists at the precise locus where the exalted sentiments of his fellow abolitionists, the New England Transcendentalists such as Emerson and Thoreau, cross over into revolutionary action. He has become the trusted cohort of African-Americans like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, the leader of a zealous band of anti-slavery terrorists, and the creator of the most daring, radical plan to free the slaves ever imagined. Historians have long argued whether Brown was a religious fanatic or merely a horse-stealing charlatan or the only important white martyr in the history of racial conflict in America - or all three. What cannot be argued is that the course of the Civil War and all subsequent American history would have been radically altered if not for John Brown's 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry.
SYNOPSIS
From a hermit's shack on an isolated California mountaintop, Owen Brown, the only surviving son of abolitionist John Brown, reminisces over his role in his father's bloody crusade -- from maintaining the Underground Railroad in upstate New York to battling proslavery settlers in Kansas to the fateful raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry. Massive in scope and brimming with love, hatred, revenge, and unbridled ego, Cloudsplitter is a dazzling re-creation of the political and social landscape of America in the years before the Civil War.
FROM THE CRITICS
USA Today
Russell Banks' remarkable Cloudsplitter brings Brown back to life, not to teach history, but as the narrator of a morally questioning novel about fathers and sons and fanaticism and how madness is measured when the sane have fled....morally questioning...
Time Magazine
Cloudsplitter is surely his best novel.
Playboy Magazine
Powerfully told....A long meditation on America's shameful enslavement of four million people....It is also a captivating portrait of a 19th-century family.
San Francisco Chronicle
Ambitious and haunting....a valuable novel about a significant American.
NY Times Book Review
Of the many writers working in the tradition today, one of the best is Russell Banks....rich and soulful.Read all 17 "From The Critics" >
WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING
Russell Banks' work presents without falsehood and with a tough affection the uncompromising moral voice of our time. You find the craziness of false dreams, the political inequalities, and somehow the sliver of redemption. I trust his portrait of America more than any other--the burden of it, the need for it, the hell of it. -- Author of The English Patient — Harper Collins - New Media
Like our living literary giants Toni Morrison and Thomas Pynchon, Russell Banks is a great writer wrestling with the hidden secrets and explosive realities of this country. — Harper Collins - New Media
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