Cloudsplitter
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| Author | Russell Banks |
|---|---|
| Cover Artist | Marc Cohen |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Historical fiction |
| Publisher | HarperCollins |
| Released | March 1998 |
| Media Type | |
| Pages | 768 (first edition) |
| ISBN | ISBN 0-06-016860-9 (first American edition, hardcover); 0676971156 (first Canadian edition, hardcover) |
| Preceded by | Rule of the Bone |
| Followed by | Invisible Stranger |
Cloudsplitter: A Novel by Russell Banks is a historical novel relating of the story of abolitionist John Brown.
The novel is narrated as a retrospective by John Brown's son, Owen Brown, from his hermitage in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California. His reminisences are triggered by the reception of an invitation from a Miss Mayo, assistant to Oswald Garrison Villard, then researching his book John Brown: A Biography Fifty Years After (Boston, 1910).
Banks raises a number of thematic questions during the lengthy portrayal of his subject matter. Notable among them are:
- How emotional attachment and hermetic exile provide for an unreliable narration.
- The moral consequences of Radicalism: violent vs. non-violent protest.
- The fine line between sanity and religious fanaticism: "...the Lord speaks to me."
- How strong familial attachment is itself a form of slavery.
- Loss of innocence.
The narrative style employed by Banks is introspective and apologetic where each character's moral compass is seen as through the microscope of Owen Brown's telling; detailed and larger than life. Bank's prose uses language that registers on the psyche: evoking the conviction that redemption can be gained by an Augustinian confession. And yet the reader is goaded into sympathy with these characters by their sheer persistence in the face of seemingly insurmountable daily travails - evoking the innocence of a new-born country.
