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A review by alundeberg
Cloudsplitter by Russell Banks
3.0
I have decided that I am way too practical of person for Russell Banks' novel, "Cloudsplitter" about arch-abolitionist John Brown. Narrated by his living son, Owen, forty years after the calamitous raid on Harpers Ferry, this is one long tale of Brown's pie-in-the-sky schemes for riches and the complete end of slavery. Like most pie-in-the-skiers, Brown's plans repeatedly fall flat with his lack of both financial acumen and a pragmatic grasp on reality. This leads him to dragging his family into deep debt and into one new home after another as he chases his next high. In the meantime, Owen is trapped in a state of arrested development as he cannot quite ever quit his father. The problem? I am not a pie-in-the-skier and get bored by people who can't resolve their issues. I made it to page 431 (out of 756), and they STILL have not made it to their raids in Kansas or Virginia-- they're still ten years away from those momentous events. And I just couldn't take it anymore.
Which is a real shame. Banks, like Maugham, has the ability to pull you directly into the action, and it is so here as he plunges the reader into pre-Civil War American life. His writing and research is superb, and his ability to distill a wide range of topics in great detail into a narrative is more than impressive. His exploration of what it is like to grow up in the shadow of a "Great Man" and the myriad ways history remembers him is insightful and nuanced, and this doesn't even touch his rendering of American attitudes towards slavery. It is just TOO long. It could have easily been 500 pages, and it would have been a better book for it.
Which is a real shame. Banks, like Maugham, has the ability to pull you directly into the action, and it is so here as he plunges the reader into pre-Civil War American life. His writing and research is superb, and his ability to distill a wide range of topics in great detail into a narrative is more than impressive. His exploration of what it is like to grow up in the shadow of a "Great Man" and the myriad ways history remembers him is insightful and nuanced, and this doesn't even touch his rendering of American attitudes towards slavery. It is just TOO long. It could have easily been 500 pages, and it would have been a better book for it.