The radical abolitionist John Brown is one of the most debated figures in American history, but scholars generally agree about his importance: Brown’s violent efforts to end slavery were fuses that led to the explosion of the Civil War. To such actual facts as the cold-blooded killings of slaveholders in Kansas and the raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, Russell Banks adds speculation about what it was like to have had John Brown for a father. The narrator of Cloudsplitter is Owen Brown, who, unlike three of his brothers, survived Harpers Ferry and then lived into old age a guilty hermit in California.
More than 150 years after Harpers Ferry, historians still argue about whether John Brown was crazy or heroic. In Cloudsplitter, Owen answers that he was crazy only if slavery was sane. But that’s not to say that Owen has a wholly positive take on his famous father. Being a Brown was a holy hell. “The Old Man” was motivated by religious fervor, quoting the Bible to justify every act. He believed God had chosen him, John Brown, as the instrument of the violent action required to free the slaves.
This long book proceeds at a slow pace, and the events for which Brown is famous don’t come in till the second half. While Brown’s abolitionist cause is always present, Banks fills in the portrait of Brown with his family life (he fathered 20 children with two wives) and his failed attempts to earn money through land speculation and the sale of wool. Some facts were altered in the interest of the story; Owen Brown, for instance, was dead by the time he’s supposedly writing his narrative. What’s undoubtedly true is Banks’s riveting depiction of the tension between North and South on the brink of war. Since many novels have been based during the Civil War but not so many just before it, Cloudsplitter is a welcome work.
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