Cloudsplitter

by Russell Banks

A triumph of the imagination and a masterpiece of modern storytelling, 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. Deeply researched, brilliantly plotted, and peopled with a cast of unforgettable characters both historical and wholly invented, Cloudsplitter is dazzling in its re-creation of the political and social landscape of our history during the years before the Civil War, when slavery was tearing the country apart. But within this broader scope, Russell Banks has given us a riveting, suspenseful, heartbreaking narrative filled with intimate scenes of domestic life, of violence and action in battle, of romance and familial life and death that make the reader feel in astonishing ways what it is like to be alive in that time.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Civil War, Literature, Historical, Novels, Literary Fiction

758 pages, Paperback

First published February 17, 1998

About the author

Russell Banks was a member of the International Parliament of Writers and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His work has been translated into twenty languages and has received numerous international prizes and awards. He has written fiction, and more recently, non-fiction, with Dreaming up America. His main works include the novels Continental Drift, Rule of the Bone, Cloudsplitter, The Sweet Hereafter, and Affliction. The latter two novels were each made into feature films in 1997.

Reviews

[Richard Derus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rating: 5* of five

On my birthday in 1999, I got a call from a childhood friend informing me that my mother had had a debilitating stroke. I started planning my trip back to my hometown, calling in favors and loans and generally mobilizing my support system. I was on a plane two weeks later, accompanied by this book.

It was a godsend. A story I knew told by a storyteller I trusted. My next two months were complicated and unpleasant, involving upheavals, betrayals, endings, and beginnings that contained the seeds of their endings. Throughout, I was ministered to by Russell Banks. The time I spent reading this book, so extremely slow by my personal standards, was time well spent and deeply savored. My friend Mark Freeburg recently picked this book up and decided to read it, so I thought I'd revisit some of my favorite moments.

It was like a dream, a beautiful, soothing dream of late autumn: 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!

How I wish today's christians thought this way, and acted on the principles they claim to venerate.

Of all the animals on this planet, we are surely the nastiest, the most deceitful, the most murderous and vile. Despite our God, or because of him. Both.

Because this is the simplest statement of a truth I've held dear all my life.

“You must not obey a majority, no matter how large, if it opposes your principles and opinions." He said this to each new volunteer and repeated it over and over to him, until it was engraved on his mind. "The largest majority is often only an organized mob whose noise can no more change the false into the true than it can change black into white or night into day. And a minority, conscious of its rights, if those rights are based on moral principles, will sooner or later become a just majority.”

Yes indeed. As we saw a year ago.

Father argued that society as a whole must come to be organized on a different basis than greed, for while material interests gained somewhat by the institutionalized deification of pure selfishness, ordinary men and women lost everything by it.

I'd like to have this printed on the hundred-dollar bill.

So my trip back through the book, even though it falls short of a full re-read, has been deeply and satisfyingly full of moment and meaning.

[Krok Zero · Rating 3 out of 5]

Finally finished this ginormous tome, after dipping in and out of it for months. I have mixed feelings. Subject matter's fascinating, of course: radical abolitionist and Christian fundamentalist John Brown raises his family to be a cult of anti-slavery soldiers, culminating in the failed attempt at a slave revolt in Harpers Ferry, VA, one of the big "road to the Civil War" events in your American history textbooks. The big unasked/unanswered question the book poses is this: why did it take a religious nutjob kamikaze terrorist to take serious action against slavery? There were other white abolitionists, of course, but they were basically journalists and theoreticians, not men of action. The only white dude in America to hold true moral convictions about the evil of slavery was a mad dervish who murdered innocent people, then led himself and his sons on a Wild Bunch-style suicide mission.

Banks tells the tale from the perspective of Brown's son Owen, the only surviving member of the family circa the turn of the 20th century. The book is pretty much split between the story itself and Owen's running commentary on the story, in which he interjects thoughts about race relations in 19th-century America and the complex father-son relationship between Owen and the "Old Man," as he was known. (The three big themes running through the book are race, religion and daddy issues.) This running commentary is consistently interesting and beautifully written, Owen writing as an old hermit whose every waking minute is haunted by the past events he's relating. But the story itself...eeennnhhhh, I dunno. I'm not at all convinced it needed to take up 750 pages, I'll say that much. Episodes involving John Brown's financial woes are so boring it almost seems like a deliberate joke of boringness. When it finally gets to the killing -- first in the "Bleeding Kansas" wars to determine whether Kansas territory would go free or slave, then in Harpers Ferry -- the book gets bogged down in action sequences, which Banks doesn't write particularly well. But the reflections, the meta-story, made me think long and hard about race and family life in the 19th century, and the broader connection to today's religiously motivated terrorism is clear.

For Owen's voice, Banks adopts a purposefully stilted prose style meant to imitate both the general windbaggedness of 19th-century verbiage and John Brown's Biblical oratory. This style is often grating, and it's not without anachronistic usage, but it does help to immerse the reader in the world, and after living with the book for a while I found myself weirdly attached to the voice. What it comes down to is there's a lot of good juicy stuff here, but there's also waaaay too much padding. I believe this could have been a damn good, verging-on-great novel if Banks had kept it somewhere in the 300-400 page range.

[Chris Berko · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely stunning reading experience.

My mom bought me this book in 1999. I was twenty four years old, living in Atlanta, and I was doing a ton of drugs and was a wild yahoo. I remember asking myself how mature did she think I was. I also knew I could not at the time give this book the respect it was due. I loved historical fiction but more in the crime and mystery categories and not something more in-line with real events. So I put this up on my shelf. I wanted to read it but not quite then. Years go by, I moved a bunch, my TBR pile grew but this one was always looking down at me from whatever shelf it was on at the time. This book started to be more than it actually was, like it represented something more to me. Like a culmination of something or like when I read it I would finally be an adult or something. I'm turning forty seven this and I feel like I'm in a constant state of mid-life crisis, and I started Cloudsplitter to help me come to terms with my adulthood. When I first began reading the writing was hard to click with and the narrator's voice didn't have much of a flow. I got really mad, like I'm finally reading this and I can't get it, WTF!!! I stuck with it though and after a while the voice clicked with me and the book came alive. The pages began to fly by and I was there living with the Brown's experiencing what it was like to live during those times, the mundane, the exciting and everything in between. Cloudsplitter also does a great job of describing timeless family dynamics and families lorded over by a stern patriarch. It also showcases what strong willed men can do to influence the behaviors of others and what lines they can get them to cross. I ended up loving the book and it exceeded my expectations that have been increasing for over twenty years.

I called my mom the other day to tell her I finally read it and loved it and to prove I mountained a mole hill out of it, she had no idea what the book was and didn't remember even buying it for me. To her defense she is seventy five now.

[Theo Logos · Rating 5 out of 5]

”Father was to be our Abraham. We were to be his little Isaacs. We were supposed to know ahead of time, however, the happy outcome of the story. We were supposed to know that it was a story, not about us and our willingness to lie on a rock on Mount Moria and be sacrificed under his knife, but about our father and his willingness to obey his terrible God.”

”In a sense I suppose that what I am inscribing on these pages is the secret history of John Brown. We each will have very different uses for it anyhow, uses shaped by those to whom we imagine we are telling our perspective tales. For me, it is being told to the dead, the long dead and buried companions of my past, and told especially to my dead father.”

Russell Banks, one of our great, modern storytellers, tells the tale of John Brown as seen through the eyes of his son, Owen. Owen Brown is recording his memories of his father for a professor who is writing a biography of the man fifty years after his failed raid on Harpers Ferry and later execution. The son, (Brown’s only son with him both in Kansas and Harpers Ferry, and his only son to survive the Harpers Ferry raid) having always lived in the shadow of his father, takes the opportunity to make his own bitter confessions of his complicated relationship with the father he had lived in awe of.

This book is much more than a simple historical fiction about John Brown. Indeed, I could argue that John Brown is a device to allow Banks to tell the story of his actual protagonist, the faithful, sad and lonely son, the wounded son, Owen Brown. Owen tells the story of his father and his family, a strikingly intimate portrait, from his earliest childhood on. While revealing a fascinating picture of his father and the large family that he dominated, his father’s strict faith (which Owen and his brothers abandoned) and the entire family’s absolute commitment to the abolition cause, he reveals his own fascinating biography. Both devoted to and resentful of the father who defined and circumscribed his life, both comforted by and isolated from his large family, Owen Brown becomes the actual protagonist while purportedly relating his father’s story.

Cloudsplitter is a story of fathers and sons and their complex and tortured relationships. It’s a tale of faith, and doubt, and obsession. It’s about the cost of being righteous in an evil land, and the near invisible line between salvation and damnation. It is meticulously researched history that knows not to be slavishly faithful to that history. It is endlessly layered, covering an entire lifetime of these complexities. And it is as brilliant as it is long.

[Larry Bassett · Rating 3 out of 5]

It took me three years to read this book. But really it said on the shelf for a good chunk of that time until I finally admitted that I was going to have to get the audible book to finish it off. And so I did.

This is a long book. Not three years long but pretty long. And like is often the case with historical fiction I am not quite sure what is historical and what is fiction. This is a story told by Owen Brown the last remaining son of the infamous John Brown Who met his end at Harpers Ferry. I didn't know much about John Brown beyond Harpers Ferry but this book pretty much takes you through his life. I would call him a religious fanatic. He was dedicated. He was determined to eliminate slavery. He was a preacher and I didn't much appreciate the fact that the book often made great diversions into his sermonizing.

I have thought at times in my life that it would be good to have a cause that you would be willing to die for. John Brown was willing to die for his cause and John Brown was willing to kill for his cause. That really comes across in this book.

The story is told from the point of view of Owen Brown. Owen is telling the story of his father 50 years after the historical events. He survived Harpers Ferry because he chose not to join in the battle when he decided it was a lost cause. He tells that his father met with Frederick Douglass hoping he could convince him to join the insurrection of the slaves that was an intragal part of his plan. But Douglas turns them down. I have no idea if this is historical fact or fiction.

Owen raises the historical question about his father's sanity several times. He never answers the question of course. John Brown was a powerful orator and could bend people to his way of thinking. But Owen also says that he played a role in driving his father on into his martyrdom at times. Owen feels guilty that he pushed his father to the brink and then abandoned him. Now how he will tell the story and finally join his father by killing himself.

[Snotchocheez · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Cloudsplitter", a fictional novel about the the abolitionist John Brown, is as painful to review as it is (at times) to read. Clearly this 750+ page behemoth is a labor of love for author Russell Banks: as exhaustive and as detailed as the events in John Brown's life are depicted, you can't help but feel that Banks lived, sleeped, breathed...well, completely inhabited John Brown and his family (particularly, the narrator, his third son Owen Brown). The book, however, is simultaneously beautiful AND boring, thought-provoking AND mind-numbing, true-to-life AND fanciful, brilliant AND mundane.

The problem might lie in the manner Banks chooses to portray this story: through a vast meandering recollection of son Owen Brown, who, nearly 40 years after the anti-slavery uprising movement ended, is approached by an historian to provide an account of John Brown's life. The book starts out quite promisingly, with Owen Brown providing a reflective, almost meditative account on the foment of Brown's abolitionist movement. Discussing the psychological and religious impetuses and imperatives that led John Brown down his road of insurrection (and martyrdom) in the name of doing away with the scourge of slavery seemed a much more interesting read than, say, merely reading a historical account of Brown's life. The problem lies in Banks inhabiting Owen Brown's character so completely that he often times comes off as a terribly unreliable narrator: he repeats himself three or more times in discussing certain sequences, and trails off or omits other key sequences entirely by saying things like "enough about that has been made public record in the history books...so I won't go into it"...then preceding comments like that with minutiae that beg for a equally detailed resolution. The formative years of John Brown's anti-slave sentiment, many of which spent in upstate New York within view of Tahawus Mountain (whence the "Cloudsplitter" title originates) in the Adirondacks, are carefully detailed...while key uprisings like the ones in the Kansas territory in the 1850s are seemingly glossed over...and the raid on Harpers Ferry, (West) Virginia in 1859, often pointed to as a pivotal event leading toward the American Civil War, barely even touched upon.

For the reader, Banks' inconsistent narrative provides a frustrating reading experience: a juxtaposition between getting a clear detailed account of John Brown's life and his causes, alongside an unfleshed-out overview on the important events in the abolitionist movement gives the reader pause as to why it took 750 pages to tell this story. Kudos to Mr. Banks for providing fiction that defies pigeon-holing: Not one of the five books I've read by him thus far resembles any of the others. The only common theme among them is the exploration of the relationships between strong (perhaps overbearing) fathers (or absent a father, a father figure) and their offspring. "Cloudsplitter" is an interesting departure for Banks. Although, while it seems like he was shooting for the moon with this epic saga, he should probably have aimed a little closer to home.

[Stephen Wallant · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just think you NEED to understand something. OK this book is just great. Now now we all know the Reserve sucked ass. And I said The Darling was great and it was but this was A THOUSAND TIMES BETTER! There are not enough stars in all of the rating systems in all the world to say what a great novel we have on our hands here.

Cloudsplitter is the English translation of the Iroquois word for Mount Marcy, the tallest mountain of the Adirondacks. Really incredible up there. So Banks has some descriptions of the Adirondacks in full summer riot, and it's spot on. Something about the Adirondacks kind of having to blow its wad quick b/c summer is so short in the high peaks. Now it SUCKS up there 10 months out of the year, but for those two months, wow. Just holy Spaghetti Monster it's beautiful.

Anyway, John Brown, yes that John Brown, Civil War John Brown that ambivalent anti-hero you forgot about from American History class, lived in the Adirondakcs which I will just call the Dacks because frankly it's a giant pain the ass to type. Running the Underground Railroad to Canada and some towns full of freed slaves deep in the Dacks. The man was MOSES. So the narrator is one of his sons, Guy who didn't die in Pottawatomie/Bleeding Kansas. Now THAT was some action. Harpers Ferry and the great betrayal! Frederick Douglas you chicken! The abolitionists lacked the courage of their convictions? Or was Brown just an extremist? Well the novel thankfully does not devolve too much into this academic masturbation thank GOD. It is more of a portrait of this time that we really can not now imagine, a time of nearing suicide. I mean. In the prewar 19th century someone said, The combined armies of Europe and Asia could not by force drink from the Ohio River. But suicide is this country's poison. And never was it deeper drunk than the failure of Harpers Ferry and the hell of civil war. So Clousdplitter captures this time when the whole COUNTRY as one became ready to embrace purest distilled molten mass suicide (because the South was such an asshole). Really unthinkable, but you can think it! IF YOU Read it.

[Amerynth · Rating 1 out of 5]

Sprawling historical novel that follows the tale of Owen Brown, the son of John Brown, the abolitionist that led the raid at Harper's Ferry. The story is really bogged down in pages and pages of useless detail (nearly 30 pages describing the family's financial situation in Ohio....) that quickly becomes repetitive. Oddly enough the novel suffers from the opposite problem too, it jumps to a new storyline with no build up whatsoever. (Owen suddenly beats up a man on his farm, for no apparent reason, then suddenly is in love with the man's wife a few pages later -- a wife he's never spoken to in nearly 500 pages of text.... a few pages later he wasn't in love after all.) The book really needs a good and thorough edit.

[Wilhelmina Jenkins · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm between a four and a five star rating, but I'll go for the five. This book was an amazing ride. As long a book as this was, I never wanted to stop reading.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Of all the animals on this planet, we are surely the nastiest, the most deceitful, the most murderous and vile. Despite our God, or because of him. Both.” 

John Brown. Those simple words, still conjure up so many conflicting images: abolitionist, terrorist, crusader, madman, insurrectionist and martyr. It still resonates, a century and a half after his death.

There have been many books written on Brown and this is Banks epic, take on this man's story. It is told entirely through the eyes of his third son, Owen, who somehow survived and escaped the raid on Harper's Ferry. He spent the rest of his life as a sheepherder in California.
Yes, this is fiction, something clearly stated in the foreward, but the amount of research Banks must have mounted, is truly astounding and his writing is robust, fluid and beautifully-rendered. A true labor of love. An over-looked American classic.

“ We pass between sea and sky with unaccountable, humiliating ease, as if there were no firmament between the firmaments, no above or below, here or there, now or then, with only the feeble conventions of language, our contrived principles, and our love of one another's light to keep our own light from going out; abandon any one of them, and we dissolve in darkness like salt in water.” 

[Ned · Rating 5 out of 5]

Historical fiction doesn't always work for me, but this was superb, and all subsequent Russell Banks haven't quite lived up to it (for me anyway). Hearing the story from the less gifted son, Owen, of the abolitionist John Brown, really worked in this novel. Much has been written of the history of John Brown, but understanding what was really underneath those powerful contradictions and that drive is something that a novel is perhaps best suited for. The artistry of language and father/son tension made this imminently readable though a tragedy (which is where the book starts, working back skillfully).

[Samantha · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first discovered Russell Banks when I encountered Lost Memory of Skin about a year ago. Topically they're very different, but a major commonality is Banks's acuity in depicting the lives of outsiders. "Cloudsplitter" is a historical novel about the radical abolitionist John Brown and his gradual metamorphosis from a deeply religious family man (and failed businessman) staunchly opposed to slavery to the man who led a failed attack on Harper's Ferry. It is told from the perspective of Brown's third son, Owen, whose unstinting devotion to his father is colored by the fact that the elder Brown has dominated his entire life. Both Owen and his father are complex, full-fleshed characters, the elder deeply conflicted between his violent and totalizing opposition to the institution of slavery and his desire to provide for his family and the younger acutely aware that he both often fails to measure up to his father and that, well into adulthood, he has failed to become his own man. Amidst tender family scenes are a few searing passages, such as when John catches Owen stealing his grandfather's watch and makes him whip his own father as punishment, and a massacre toward the conclusion.

[Lydia Lewis · Rating 1 out of 5]

Chapter 5 begins, "I don't know how much time has passed since I began this account - days, weeks, a fortnight - for it is as if I have been elsewhere, a place where time is measured differently and space is not bounded as it usually is." That's how I felt reading this. Rave reviews, Editor's choice! How could this be true? If it had been edited down by 2/3rds it would then have been an awesome book. Redundancy abounded.

[Julie · Rating 1 out of 5]

How this book ranks as a New York Times Book Review "Editors' Choice" is beyond me. At 758 pages, it's about 600 pages too long, making me think Banks must have some sort of auteur cred with his publisher that allows him to demand no editor lay hands on his oeuvre.

This is fiction, so I realize it doesn't have to be a biography-level work on abolitionist John Brown, but let's try for something at least marginally more than superficial character depiction. I mean give him some bad habits, a nervous tic, a strange sense of humor--anything to make him human! And I don't just mean John Brown's character--there isn't one person in this book deeper than the ink on the page. Even the narrator, Owen Brown, is so inconsistent and flat, I couldn't buy any of his supposed metamorphosis (his transformation from gimpy middle son to machiavellian militant).

Also, could we have a plot with blood, guts, and heart? Or should we spend pages upon pages detailing the goods in the Brown farmhouse or the ins and outs of Brown's indebtedness to fill-in-the-blank farmer? Or quoting the lengthy bible-speak of Brown's sermons? Over and over and over again. Banks spent--no lie--the first 30 pages regaling us with sentence after sentence telling us (via his narrator Owen) he HAS to tell this story, it's time that he tells this story, so he's going to tell us the story--just wait, he's got quite a story to tell, and so on. 30 pages of it.

And, the conceit of having John Brown's son narrate as if he's telling a publisher's agent his story makes no sense in that it provides no value whatsoever. In fact, it's even ludicrous that we're supposed to believe a 19th-century farm boy is going to open up to a city woman and tell her, in detail, about his first experience with a prostitute, that he's basically a closet homosexual (something that had nothing to do with this story--although it would have been more interesting), that he basically killed the ex-slave he loved (which it seems, he didn't kill), and that his brother castrated himself (which was an incongruent scene that had nothing to do with the price of tea in China).

This book was "tell, don't show" at its finest. Coming off as wispy, trailing sentences I assume Banks means to tantalize, but instead come off like a fainting couch heroine on a soap opera. I paraphrase (because, to quote, would require 30 pages): "Fred, well he, he was just special...as we would all come to find out. But not until it was too late." It turns out I never found out why Fred was so special. He cut off his own balls--does that make him special? I suppose that's one interpretation (he did do it with melodramatic flair: "He hurled his testicles away into the willow thicket with great force, as if violently casting out a demon. On his face he had an expression of wild pride." Apparently, it didn't hurt much because, right after the pride, he "was possessed by a sudden placidity--a great calm.")

I learned a lot more about John Brown, the abolitionist movement, and the feeling in the country at the time by reading the YA-level "American Troublemakers" series JOHN BROWN: MILITANT ABOLITIONIST. And, yes, it was by-the-book, junior-high-level nonfiction, but damn! At least it caught some of the fire behind Brown and the events of the time.

Banks, I believe, might be the first person to make the horror of our slave years not tragic, but boring.

[Donna Davis · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a novel based on what truth is available. The story centers on Owen Brown, the youngest and last living son of John Brown. What I was looking for, of course, was information about John Brown himself. However, because he understood the need for secrecy in his movements, considered himself (and usually really was) a hunted man, he did not leave copious journals. In fact, writing was not one of his talents. What he did care about were the 3 million men, women and children shackled to the plantation system, sometimes literally. He was the only white man recorded in history to have been friends (real friends) with Black people, who understandably were deeply suspicious.

Telling it all through Owen's eyes is a strong device. Banks is a really good writer, and I think this is my favorite among his published works.

The question that hangs in the air for historians interested in this time period, and in Brown in particular, has always been whether he was sane or a madman (and as a history teacher, I have to say that at least one text mentions him only briefly, and comes down strongly on the side of his being a crazy man).

There is one undeniable fact, whichever side one takes: he was the first white man to kill and die for Black men. At that time, and for a long time after, his name carried great respect among Black men and women in the U.S. I am inclined to agree with them.

In these modern times, we know that it is possible to be mentally ill, and yet not be unable to function. I'm willing to bet that most families, if you trace the lines hard and long enough, will have at least one such person. And reading this novel convinced me that this was the case with John Brown.

Owen's life was not an attractive one. At times, it appeared that their father had deserted the family; he would go away on one religious/political (for Brown, they were inseparable) mission or another, and not come back for years. There were times that the children of the family nearly starved to death, and their lives were not only desperately poor, but beset by constant danger. The stress alone might be enough to unhinge almost anyone.

I think I should leave the story as Banks tells it to the reader. His prose is brilliant and compelling. This is a very long book, but I finished it pretty quickly, because I couldn't leave this family in danger until I had seen the very end. Banks brings characters alive in a way few writers do. I was a member of the Brown family until the book was over; their struggle became mine, and each poor decision made me flinch and my stomach felt leaden. Doom!

It also left me with the question we can never answer: what if Brown had waited another (roughly) ten years to lead the revolt? Might he have met with greater success?

If you like seeing characters developed well and also like historical fiction when it is done well, this book is terrific. (It is also very large, and heavy. If you have a nook or Kindle and it is available, consider reading it that way).

[Authentikate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cloudsplitter is a sweeping tome chronicling the life of Owen Brown, the son of historic abolitionist John Brown.

I am a complete lover of historical fiction and so, if I'm honest, this review gets a one star bump simply on account of Kate's a nerd. I found many sections tedious, drawn out, and employing superfluous prose. The author often took dozens of pages to get to his topic and often it had this reader groaning and eye rolling with vigor.

That said, what makes a historical fiction book work is: does it address history correctly?; is it addressing history in a readable way?; and did it teach me something I didn't know?

Cloudsplitter, while unnecessarily long, did have some beautiful writing and entertained while it informed. Had this been anything other than historical fiction, I would have rated it three stars. It's still worth reading, I think, and admittedly may not annoy other readers.

[Mmars · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yes, this is a long book. But sometimes the time is right and so it must have been for me with this book some time ago. I loved it. Banks' mesmerized me in this one. The backwoodsy American who became a zealous abolitionist kept me up to the wee hours. I don't know how much Banks embellished the story ----- I'm guessing a lot ---- but it IS fiction and it does capture the essence of the era's American spirit very, very well. I was transported and that is a sign if a well-told tale.

[James Murphy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cloudsplitter is a novel about John Brown narrated in rather straightforward fashion by his son Owen. It isn't in the end about John as much as it's about the son, one of the survivors of the family's violent abolitionist activities leading up the the American Civil War. The story Owen tells details Brown family life maintaining an important waystation of the Underground Railroad in Mt. Elba, New York in the shadow of Mt Tahawus, whose finned shape and height invited the sobriquet Cloudsplitter. Later John Brown's fiery faith and rhetoric so forceful it might split clouds and rain brimstone led the family to fighting encroaching slavery in Kansas and to attack the arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia in the expectation they'd incite a general slave uprising.

This is all part of the history of the 1840s and 1850s United States fractured by slavery. Woven into the novel are historical figures we know and the satellite themes of romance and politics of the times. The dominant personality, of course, is John Brown, who's seen in the conventional portrayal he's come down to us, as the Biblically-inspired communicant with God expressing His wrath through abolitionist engagement. If John is not, Owen is subject to as much uncertainty and mistrust the politically-heated times prompted. All this makes the imposing father that much more towering, looming as intimidatingly over the novel as Mt Tahawus looms over the family farm and stands for the fiery father who speaks to God and considers abolition a prophecy and mission. A key moment is when father and son attend a lecture on the nature of heroism by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Owen comes away seeing John in the same heroic light, as a Puritan version of Emerson, an important part of how the story becomes Owen's instead of John's and helping explain why he and so many others would willingly follow a man who's led into such horrific violence by messages from God. Owen's interpretation of his father is the fuel the novel runs on. As large a man as John Brown is, he eventually dissolves in the life his son carries forward into the world.

[George · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting, overly long, historical fiction novel set in 1850s about John Brown, narrated by John Brown’s son, Owen. The book describes the fractured political and social society of pre-Civil War America, where slavery and secession are fracturing the country as a whole.

John Brown lead the radical plan to free the black slaves. Initially by persuasion and then by force. John Brown had a large family who married again after his first wife died. Owen struggled to accept his step mother. John Brown was a farmer, businessman who acted as an agent for sheep farmers, and land speculator, who became a guerilla fighter, terrorist and martyr.

The novel describes the Brown family members and their lives in the years leading up to the Harper’s Ferry massacre.

An intimate, compassionate telling of the life of a rural American family.

This book was first published in 1998.

[Aliesha Hill · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's really a 3.5.

I've had this book for well over 10 years now. In that time, I've picked it up 3 or 4 times and never read past the 100 page mark. I've even had it in my declutter pile and picked it back out of it. This year, I determined was going to be the year I read this book through or got rid of it for good. I opted to read it start to finish and, despite the low rating, I'm glad I did.

I have mixed feelings on this one. At 758 pages, it is far too long. Had this book been cut down by half, it may have been one of the best books I've ever read, which is saying a lot because historical fiction is not a genre I ever read.

I found the story to have a general sadness to it, but I find that to be how history goes as it seems great things rarely happen without personal sacrifice. I didn't deduct any starts for this but the bittersweet ending wasn't the happy one I was hoping to get.

I was fascinated by the complex relationship between Owen and his dad. My heart went out to Owen many times throughout as he attempted to navigate his complicated feelings toward John. This dynamic is a predominant theme throughout.

I found the discussion of religion to be enjoyable. I love how John Brown was shown to be so religious (mostly old testament it seems) but also a hypocrite when it served him. I think this can be true of many religious folk throughout history and into the present and the author also showed how that was a part, though perhaps a small part, of why Owen struggled so much in his faith. I was also really fascinated by the points where Owen referred to his dad as his God, again referring to the very complicated codependent, likely toxic relationship they had.

There was too much detail at times, but not as in scene description, it was as though the author chose to use all of the words in a thesaurus to describe one thing. Every time I encountered this, I was ripped out of the story and it became easy to get confused and/or forget what I was just reading about. Along this line, there were way too many unnecessary stories from the lives of John and Owen throughout. While I think that these were overall unnecessary, I do see how Banks used even these superfluous stories to build the story, brick by brick. While I could appreciate how they moved the story ever so slowly forward and, in the case of all the stories around the Brown family finances, spoke to the character of John Brown, the story would have been vastly improved without them.

I found some of the social commentary in this book glorious. In particular, Owen's (or maybe it was John's) view on poor white pro slavers. I found that particular part so accurate and believe the overall idea of that passage to apply even today. The idea that only white people fighting to abolish slavery would never work, only slaves fighting to free themselves would never work, but everyone working together would make it happen was another great one. There really were some gems in this story and it made it much more enjoyable.

I enjoyed the action scenes and was really into the story for the first and last quarters of the book but found the middle to be a slog. Any time I put it down, it was hard to want to pick it back up. I will say, in reading this I was prompted to do a little light research into John Brown and was amazed at how closely the fictional story resembled the real one. I might pick up a biography of John Brown one day. He seemed to be a good, albeit selfish and complicated, man. While he did not seem wise in every area, it seemed he was quite wise on the horrors of slavery, the wrongness of it all and that white people needed to fight too. He was an outspoken abolitionist in a time and place when those views were the minority. In this way, he was a great example for his children and for others and I hope his place in history is never forgotten.

I will never regret my time with this book, but wish it had been done a little better. Had the author cut down a good chunk of length, this would have been a 10 star review.

[Pierce McCaffrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful epic book about the people in the wake of truly historical figures. How our beliefs are tested by our surroundings. How our intentions are warped and twisted over time. The book being told from the perspective of Owen Brown 40 years after the raid on Harper's Ferry made it that much more meaningful. He was the only person to escape the raid with his life and watched impotently as his father's martyrdom largely succeeded. However, due to his reliance on his father for guidance as well as the trauma of the actions he committed in the war against slavery, he is unable to bask in his victories. We reach out for the wheel of history to turn it for one brief moment only to lose our grasp and watch the world leave us behind.

Not to be a hagiography or a white savior book, Cloudsplitter recreates the complex world of pre civil war America that includes heroic black freedman and anti slavers like Fredrick Douglass and Harriet Tubman fighting out of a genuine experience being enslaved and hatred directly flowing from that. It compares these figures with the high minded idealists of abolitionist Boston and the self interested white northern yeoman. Welding these forces together through clear morals and without self consciousness or guilt, John Brown was able to work directly with northern blacks who saw him as trustworthy and honest while also riling up the sentiments of northern land seekers who otherwise would just be concerned with themselves and their families.

The most touching and interesting part of this book is the friendship and tragedy surrounding Owen Brown and his friend from the black settlement, Lyman Epps. This friendship showed the promise and beauty of an integrated future where black and white lent a hand to each other as equals. However, in this relationship the past hung around Owen's neck like a noose and destroyed the potential of this friendship while causing a lot of damage (no spoilers!)

The essential take away from this book is that racism is a form of ego that we cling to like a comfortable blanket without ever realizing we are. Only history itself represented by the titular mountain cutting through the sky can break it. We think we are weaker than how we present ourselves to others but we are stronger than we think we are. We just need the right moment.

(should be a movie)

[Johnny D · Rating 4 out of 5]

“It is better to be in a place and suffer wrong than to do wrong” – Owen Brown’s last words.

Historians can never agree about whether John Brown was a madman, a terrorist, a religious fanatic, a prophet, a poetic hero, or some complex combination of all of these things. Personally, I think that John Brown is the most fascinating character in American history. I find the unwavering egalitarianism of John Brown to be inspirational. He lived his life by a higher code, unfazed by the tide of opinion or the surrounding cultural norms. He was the antiracist radical that so many people mistakenly portray Abraham Lincoln as.

Basically, I am not an unbiased reviewer of this book.

This is a thoroughly researched and intelligently crafted book. Russell Banks offers a portrait of John Brown that is neither hero worship nor character assassination. Instead, it is a flesh and blood John Brown that emerges: a deeply religious, flawed, idealistic, and sincere man whose extremism was a natural extension of his passion for justice. In Banks’ interpretation, it is John Brown’s son and lieutenant, Owen, whose violent nature focuses his father’s rage and pushes him to action. This device works well in explaining some particularly confusing aspects of John Brown’s life story. It is Owen Brown’s eyes that we see his father through, and this aids in showing the force and power of John Brown’s personality.

Owen Brown, however, emerges as a bit of an antisocial asshole. Some of his redeeming qualities are explored, but his sense of humour and affability are lost. In a novel that pays this much attention to historical detail, this is a forgivable excess — especially when it works so very well.

If you’re interested in John Brown’s life and don’t mind a long (very long) book with an often plodding pace, then I highly recommend this book. This is the sort of thing that historical fiction should be — actually historical.

[Paula · Rating 1 out of 5]

Another DNF. I had been warned that the book was not only long but long winded, so I downloaded the audio version to listen while stuck in traffic or raking leaves to avoid the risk of being put to sleep reading late at night.

It didnt help. After two hours of landscape descriptions and the narrator's thoughts about how they reminded him of every detail of insignificant reminders of his family with absolutely no hint of a plot- except that he was reluctant to get to the meat of the matter, I chose the whine of the leaf blower rather than the book.

Ever try to get information about an important but disagreeable topic out of out of a very lonely old person? A hermit desperate to talk to another human being about every thought they were unable to share in their decades long loneliness , but also desperate to avoid the the topic at hand or bring the visit to an end?

No matter how beautiful and clear the writing style or melodic the readers voice and cadence- something must also happen. Two hours of an old man's meanderings on nothing was more than enough to turn me off.

[Abby · Rating 4 out of 5]

A gorgeously written (and sympathetic) portrait of the controversial abolitionist John Brown, presented from the vantage point of his son Owen. I'm surprised that I haven't heard more about Russell Banks; he's a gifted stylist and storyteller. The novel starts out in a slow and murky way, but it certainly rewards those who keep reading. I think it was a bit longer than it needed to be, but I came to enjoy Owen's narration so much that I didn't mind. There was lots to think about here, regarding our American heritage of racism.

[Jacob · Rating 5 out of 5]

"For even if we cannot know the ultimate consequence of our actions or inactions, we must nonetheless behave as if they do have ultimate consequences. No little thing in our lives is without meaning; never mind that we can never know it ourselves. I did what I did, my duty, in order to free the slaves. I did it to change history. It is finally that simple. My immediate motives, of course, at every step of the way were like everyone else's, even Father's-mixed, often confused and selfish, and frequently unknown even to me until many years later. But so long as I was doing my duty, so long as I was acting on the principles that I had learned when a child, then I was bending my life to free the slaves: I was shaping and curving it like a barrel stave that would someday fit with other lives similarly bent, so as to construct a vessel capable of measuring out and transporting into the future the history of our time and place. It would be a history capable of establishing forever the true nature and meaning of the nineteenth century in the United States of America, and thus would my tiny life raise a storm that would alter the face of the planet. Father's God-fearing, typological vision of the events that surrounded us then was not so different from mine. My vision may have been secular and his Biblical, but neither was materialistic. They were both, perhaps, versions of Mr. Emerson's grand, over-arching, transcendental vision, just not so clearly or poetically expressed. At least in my case. In Father's, I'm not so sure, for the Bible is nothing if not clear and poetical."

Cloudsplitter is written from the perspective of Owen Brown, one of John Brown's sons who was with him during the Kansas War and the raid on Harper's Ferry. Owen Brown is now an old man, reflecting back on his life through a series of letters he is writing to a woman who is working on a biography of his father. The book covers a large time span, from the 1830s up to 1859. Russell Banks writing is very good, he does a great job of recreating the time period. The characters speak in the vernacular of their time and Banks is very skilled at recreating the setting, which is crucial to understanding how the Brown family lived, how the Underground Railroad operated and how John Brown's guerilla war tactics succeeded for so long. Another impressive part of this book is how Banks is able to keep the story so personal and fully flesh out the family dynamics without getting lost in the larger than life persona of John Brown. The writing is romantic but direct, at times melodramatic and at times unflinching in its depictions of death and violence.

The structure of the novel is episodic, working through Owen Brown's memories in roughly chronological order, with the major themes of the novel re-emerging throughout. I felt a deep understanding and connection to the character of Owen Brown. He is a boy stuck in the shadow of his morally righteous and authoritative father, who frustrates him and restricts him but who he cannot abandon. Owen struggles with finding meaning in his life and often feels alienated, angry and lonely. He does not have the religious convictions of his father and so is often lost on what the correct action is. He acts as a great foil to the self-assured John Brown.

The book is over 750 pages long but it justifies its length. Beyond the philosophical discussions it is simply a great story in an incredibly interesting and volatile period of history. Smuggling slaves away from bounty hunters, working with Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman and Ralph Waldo Emerson, taking on drunken militias in Kansas, there is a lot here. A standout episode for me was Owen and Father Brown's trip to England in 1848. The day to day life of maintaining a large family and farm isolated in the Adirondack mountains was fascinating to me as well. The level of manual labour needed from all members of the family puts us to shame.

The central question I kept asking myself while reading Cloudsplitter was: How did John Brown know that his beliefs were right and true? How did he know his actions were following the right path? I think the opening quote I transcribed is as close to an answer as I will get, that of course you cannot really know, but you must act as though your life has larger consequences, and knowing this act according to your principles to shape your vision onto the world. When written out this sounds obvious and straightforward. When seen in practice it is awe-inspiring.

From a Marxist perspective it is interesting to see what pushed John Brown towards violence when others would not. Two major events seem to be responsible for this. First, was Brown's disastrous trip to England where he sold his sheep's wool at a loss, causing him to declare bankruptcy in 1849. Second was the passing of the Fugitive Slave Act by Congress in 1850. Brown's bankruptcy finally freed him from his pursuit of financial success and left him with nothing left to lose. His material conditions needed to deteriorate to a level where he felt completely alienated from society and was forced to focus his full attention on ending slavery. The Fugitive Slave Act required free states to capture and return escaped slaves to the slaveholders, and made it a crime to assist them in any way. This forced Northeners to either support slavery or revolt against the U.S. government. It forced Brown and many others to take the next step and break the law rather than be complicit in slavery. Once this line was crossed it became clear that other laws could be broken if they were also unjust.

I firmly believe that John Brown was not crazy and that his actions were justified. He had absolute belief in God, and so his path was clear to him. He had to oppose slavery at every point in his life. He never compromised his beliefs no matter how difficult it made his and his family's lives. At the same time he did not act maliciously to those who did not follow his strict moral compass, except for those facilitating slavery, and held himself to the highest standard. With hindsight it is easy to look at John Brown and say: "Well of course he was so confident and determined in his beliefs because slavery is so obviously evil. I would have done everything to end slavery too." I don't think many of us would. I don't know if I would. This is made clear in the book with countless examples. Most white people in the North were "against" slavery, but they did not want to think or interact with it. White people in general turned against John Brown for making them uncomfortable and causing trouble, even when they supported his beliefs. Many of the famous abolitionists toured around and gave grand speeches but they would never risk their lives or status to fight against slavery. That is the actual requirement for making real change: being willing to die for your beliefs. That is what makes John Brown so admirable.

[Dennis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Terrorist or freedom-fighter? This was the second novel I read in less than six months that dealt with the abolitionist John Brown and, historically, this was by far the superior, and I think it even surpassed the other in terms of literature. While “The Good Lord Bird” is tragicomic – with more comedy than anything else – this is a historical novel that treats with the gradual escalation of John Brown’s quest to free the slaves, and by any means necessary. The author, Russell Banks, acknowledges that he took liberties with history – for instance, John Brown’s son, Owen, narrates this story but didn’t live nearly as long in life as he does in the book – but the basic history is true, from John Brown’s disastrous business adventures to his many children (most of whom die along the way, it seems) to the Pottawatomie Massacre of unarmed slave supporters in Kansas, followed by his reign of terror there before his equally disastrous raid on the armory in Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. This is the history but the story told by Owen Brown is more complex than that. Owen Brown is an unreliable narrator, a twisted and tortured individual who can never escape the shadow of his father – or in the words of one character, he will never be “half the man” that his father is; in a sense, this is the story of a man who will never rise to the level of his father, a man whose absolute commitment to a cause and clear religious vision and willingness to sacrifice himself for it is changing history and Owen, even as he is at times the impetus for action, in his own mind is an inconsequential nothing. He’s sexually confused, full of rage and violence, and this affects his narrative as he’s unsure of almost everything in his life, including his father who he views with a form of ambivalence. What he needs is a psychiatrist but what he gets is a crusade.

Now, a word or two about Russell Banks, one of the most unappreciated American writers, in spite of two Pulitzer nominations. In 1986, his book “Continental Drift” was co-runner-up with “The Accidental Tourist” to the winner, “Lonesome Dove”; much as I loved Banks’s book and recommend it everywhere, this is hard to argue with. In 1999, “Cloudsplitter” was co-runner-up with “The Poisonwood Bible” to the winner, “The Hours”. (Didn’t read it, only saw the film. Also, interesting because “The Poisonwood Bible” also had to do with a father’s religious mission transformed his family in a tragic way.) Two of Banks’s novels have been made into acclaimed films, “Affliction” with Nick Nolte and James Coburn, who won an Oscar for his portrayal of a domineering alcoholic father, and “The Sweet Hereafter” about the aftermath in a small town of a school bus accident. Russell Banks mostly deals in tragic consequences and uncomfortable truths but he’s worth checking out if you haven’t already.

Finally, “Cloudsplitter” is not for everyone, first because it’s a big book (just short of 800 pages) and second because not everyone cares about the subject matter. Owen Brown neither whines nor apologizes, he makes his case and laments where he got it wrong, even when he really didn’t. He’d like to be at his father’s stature but fails when tested, which he also laments. However, it’s a slice of American history which will be debated for generations: who and what was John Brown? Do the ends justify the means and would the American Civil War have started when it did without him? The book is an American tragedy but an awesome historical tale in novel form which is worth reading.

[Johnny G. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I would have liked to give this enormously long historical fiction book 4 or 5 stars, but I didn't, and here's why.
From the get-go, I learned that the narrator, Owen Brown, son of the United States' #1 abolitionist John Brown, was too long winded. Too wordy, too many thoughts, not enough action. Second of all, I found it hard to believe that all of his brothers were in constant awe of their father's holiness, and how he twisted Bible scripture into making the people he spoke to believe that if something is NOT done to free the slaves in the Southern states, they really aren't living holy lives. It would have been nice to have maps in the beginning of a 758-page novel of their Adirondack neighborhood of North Elba, New York, the Kansas territory that was split between being a slave state and a free state, and, finally, Harper's Ferry, which was a spark that would ignite the Civil War. There are many small moments when Owen Brown lives his own life - and not through what his father would necessarily be pleased with him doing - that I thought were great! Yet, he always returns to his father, who has a constant pull over him, and contorts his sons' thinking that all Negroes must be freed because it's God's command to do so.
This author knows his stuff. He's a professor at Princeton, and gives specific details into John Brown's life, historic details about how people lived, the abolitionist raids in Kansas and takeover at Harper's Ferry. However, it's a kindness to your readers who may not be so knowledgeable of the mid-1800's to cut to the action a little more quickly.

[Mark R. · Rating 4 out of 5]

****1/2

One of the most compelling novels I've read recently, "Cloudsplitter" is a fictional account of the life, dreams, and actions of the famous abolitionist John Brown, as told by his son, Owen Brown. About Owen, not much is known--which makes him a good candidate for first person narrator of this epic piece of historical fiction.

Russell Banks' novel is written from the perspective of OB in the year 1899, almost half a century after his father's famous last stand. The language is not modern-sounding, but at the same time, Banks has adapted the manner of spoken and written word from the nineteenth century, updating it enough that modern readers aren't hung up on unfamiliar phrasing and style.

You can positively feel this man's agony as Owen Brown describes a life of servitude under his father, a man he's constantly reminded is great, a man of fame and infamy, who serves a god with fierce words, actions, and violence, a god Owen is not even sure exists.

So many themes surrounding family, country, race, religion . . . I could read it again this year and probably not even get it all.

[Sharon Barrow Wilfong · Rating 3 out of 5]

I bought Cloudsplitter because the Wall Street Journal's book club had decided to read this book together on Facebook.

Synopsis: John Brown the slave abolitionist insurrectionist is already hanged and dead. Several years later, one of his sons, Owen, in old age relates his life story to an unnamed journalist.

First the positive:

The writing is gorgeous. Banks creates a luscious backdrop as he paints people and landscapes in a pre-Civil era. The reader easily enters into that time period.

Secondly, he writes a good story. If one ignores that he is writing about historical figures, the events and interpersonal relationships and how they are carried out is interesting.

The negative:

Owen Brown has apparently spent his life fighting his inner demons and trying to make sense out of what his father did.

The narrator's voice is spoken in a relentlessly heavy monotone which casts a grey haze over everything as one is imagining the story playing out in one's head while reading the words. It makes reading the book a practice of self-discipline and at 728 pages it can at times be tortuous.

Secondly, Banks is obviously superimposing 21st century cultural attitudes on a bygone time. That is not only annoying it makes the story telling suspect. How accurate is it? I have arrived at the conclusion that if I want to learn about historical events it's better to read several non fiction sources.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is pretty well done. I think it relies on history a bit much for an ending, the ending that it tries to provide itself being pretty much just technique and not really satisfying from a narrative standpoint, and goes on at times way longer than it needs to, being a bit self-indulgent, but it isn't bad. It certainly paints a vivid picture thoroughly, and is perhaps the best of the Banks I've read so far.