John Brown Legend Irrelevant Details Weigh Down Russell Banks’ New Novel About Famous Abolitionist

“Cloudsplitter” by Russell Banks (HarperFlamingo, 758 pp., $27.50)

As he proved so forcefully with his 1984 novel, “Continental Drift,” Russell Banks has a passionate grasp of the braided history of race and class in America. Perhaps more than any other contemporary white novelist, he has struggled with the emotional realm of black-white relations: the affection and conflict and endemic otherness between, say, a working-class white guy from New Hampshire and a Jamaican fisherman who helps him survive.

But Banks’s best subject matter (the familial strife of “Affliction,” the tragedy of children in “The Sweet Hereafter”) has also sent him into the corridors of violence and death. It seems fitting, then, that his longest work should take on one of the bloodiest controversies in American history: the story of abolitionist John Brown and his small army of sons and believers, who tried to start a slave insurrection in the 1850s and died, depending upon your perspective, martyrs or fools or murderers.

It is neither a pretty story nor a short one, and “Cloudsplitter” isn’t, either. The novel marches through the two decades preceding Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry, Va., in October 1859, which resulted in his execution for treason six weeks later. The narrator of the story is Owen Brown, the third son and chief lieutenant to “Old Osawatomie,” as Brown became known after his raids in the free state of Kansas.

When the novel opens it is 1899; Owen is an old man living as a shepherd in the isolated mountains of California, where he escaped four decades earlier after the deaths of his brothers and father. Descending into old age and grief and possibly delusions, he is writing his last “confession” to the assistant of Professor Oswald Garrison Villard, who (in real life) would go on to complete the first massive study of John Brown.

“Was my father mad?” Owen asks at the beginning of his retrospective. “For if he was sane, then terrible things about race and human nature, especially here in North America, are true.”

Therein lies the vast map where Banks presumes to travel, though the exploration of the question itself - John Brown’s sanity - is often lost to the realms of historical events, religious inquiry, and family dynamics. (Banks never mentions, for instance, the documented propensity of mental illness in Brown’s family, particularly his mother’s side.)

What “Cloudsplitter” offers instead is a fictionalized background of John Brown and his clan: his failed efforts as a speculator and businessman; his abolitionist zeal, which grew over the years to a certainty that the Lord was speaking through him; his monstrous benevolence, which commanded his offspring - he fathered 20 children with two wives - to obey and mirror him through piety, prayer and, eventually, bloodshed. His was not an easy family in which to survive, in any sense of the word.

“Cloudsplitter” takes its title from the name the Iroquois gave the mountain overlooking North Elba, N.Y., where Brown made his home, and the novel delivers a psychic geography of the land itself: an antebellum America defined by rivers and mountain gorges and railroads headed west.

The world as depicted here is not only one of daily Scripture and anti-slavery passion turned into armed rebellion but a palpable milieu of squirrel stew, cholera, and ague, the yearly business of difficult childbirth, and dying children.

Russell Banks’s passion about the myths and truths of John Brown’s legend is what fuels this novel, but that same love of subject has also made the story far too long and sometimes laborious.

Lost in his memories and lifelong guilt since he helped his father stage their raids, Owen is a garrulous, sometimes overbearing narrator who tends to describe the same emotional legacy in four different ways. We are further given everything from household inventories to endless history and Scripture lessons here without much regard to the overall scheme of the novel.

Such information lends itself to biography or social history but not necessarily to fiction, particularly that which reaches toward an inner emotional reality to explain an external one. The result of this profligacy is that the most moving and important parts of the novel - Owen’s relationship with his father, their work on the Underground Railroad, the honorable idealism of abolitionism changed, at Brown’s end, into scattershot violence - are obscured by the weight of indiscriminant detail.

For all its attention to one of the pivotal figures in American history, what “Cloudsplitter” really seeks to capture is the shadowy bond between an obsessed father and his desperate, motherless son - the way heartbreak and misspent rage can manifest as a bloody day in history, its infinite legacies too often shaped by one man’s paths and choices.

Using his Bible as a military manual, John Brown believed he was doing God’s work, but he also took counsel from Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson and, eventually, the alienated son he chose to advise him. Educated within the liberal, anti-slavery realm of transcendentalist thought, fortified daily by prayer and self-abnegation, Owen Brown was also driven by anger and loneliness and what turned out to be the dark beckoning of violence for its own sake.

In Banks’ depiction, by the time the Brown men descended upon five proslavery men at what became known as the Pottawatomie Massacre, their guiding light was the convergence of several indelible factors: the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, the fight over Kansas as a free state, the clubbing of Charles Sumner in Senate chambers, the death of Owen’s beloved black friend Lyman Epps, and the final colluding forces of God and history. By the time they were finished, five men were taken out of their houses and butchered like cattle. The smell of blood was stronger than moral intent or even memory.

“Human beings were sliced open by our swords,” Owen Brown remembers, “and there the darkness entered in.”

And yet despite their descent into actions that Owen calls “wholly evil,” the story of this transformation remains oddly unconvincing.

This was not for lack of trying. If anything, Owen provides so many ponderous explanations for the events of his family’s life that you simply want him to hush after a while.

On the other hand, Banks beautifully delivers the core ambivalence of the Brown’s family’s racial attitudes. Despite their respect and even avenging love for their black brethren, Owen, at least, was often trapped by this prescription of nobility, a conflict manifest in his explosions of rage and his feigned superiority.