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Banks' newest novel triumphs

The moon had set, and the last stars, like silver nails, had pinned the canopy overhead." The sky is always on the verge of falling in Russell Banks' new novel, aptly titled Cloudsplitter (Harper Collins, $27.50). The title refers to Tahawus, a mountain, that towers over the home of the equally imposing hero of these pages, Captain John Brown, the messianic abolitionist whose death at Harpers Ferry sparked this nation's Civil War.

Although Banks' "work of the imagination" does nothing to diminish the aura that surrounds this historical figure, he does go to considerable lengths with his fictional John Brown to show the debilitating personal consequences of greatness. This is essentially a story of failed fathers and sons, locating Banks in a territory he knows well – well enough to know that much is still unexplored.

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Banks has dealt with this topic numerous times before in what may be his most accomplished novel, Affliction, as well as in a remarkable essay on the effect of Disney's Bambi on his life. It is the image of the little deer's father that Banks discusses in the latter piece. Always seen in the distance, cloaked in its own shadow, the stag is present in its very absence, like the Ghost Hamlet cannot rid from his mind's eye. How damaging it was for the little boy to exit the theater and accept this view of the present/absent father. And how understandable, too – the image of the stag sticks with many of us because we have seen its three-dimensional equivalent in our own distant fathers.

The narrator of the book is Owen Brown, John Brown's third-eldest son in a family that swells to more than ten, with many children dying in infancy. Owen is like his father – and Bambi, for that matter – in that he has lost his natural mother at a young age. With no one to mitigate the influence of the father who Banks refers to as the "Old Man," we know this loss will shape Owen irrevocably.

Told in hindsight, Cloudsplitter is Owen's confession and allows Banks to establish a tone from the outset that is terribly and often deceptively direct. After discovering his mother's dead body, Owen walks out to meet the Old Man: "Slowly, I turned and left the darkened room. Father waited outside, still seated on the doorstep. I sat down beside him, taking the same position there as he, head down, hands on knees, back straight. Father and son. We did not speak."

The two are more similar than different, but similar in their shared inability to speak. The cause of abolition substitutes for this lost dialogue. In seeking to heal that greater fissure, they will leave their personal one intact.

Race is as central to Banks' concerns in Cloudsplitter as fathers and sons; and they may be related. The analogy seems (intentionally) forced. At one point Owen admits to feeling like a "slave" to his father. His is a predetermined role, and because of the framing device employed, never once do we get the sense that Owen can walk away from the Old Man. Even if he wanted to escape, Owen's moral sense would not allow it. He agrees with his father that the cause of abolition is "the one question more than any other that a white man revealed the true nature of his character," and being that father and cause necessarily go hand in hand, the son can not abandon one without abandoning the other.

One of the most fulfilling activities in Owen's life involves carrying fugitive slaves to Canada and freedom on the Underground Railroad. These journeys and much of the Browns' dealings with slavery continually reenact the scene on the steps after Owen's mother's death. Father and son are in the "same position," "back straight" as to their moral obligation to free the slaves. But despite this similarity, they still do not speak. Owen does not tell his father that his antislavery zeal is buttressed by his own desire for freedom and the Old Man fails to tell his son that his obsession serves to bury his own paternal failings under the guise of fervent righteousness.

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Banks does not condemn John Brown the father completely, however. The novel is strongest, in fact, where we watch his endless struggle to balance his obligations to family and cause, exacerbated by social class. The Old Man listens to Emerson in Boston, "his large, workingman's hands and wrists sticking out from his sleeves." Rhetoric for Emerson, sacrifice was a tangible reality for men like Brown. When he attempts to ferry fugitive slaves across the border, he loses days of work needed to pay off the debts on his farm. Again, Owen sits beside his father in Emerson's audience; but this time he feels "sorry" for the Old Man, who looks "surprisingly diminished" in the crowd. It is a turning point for Owen, who now realizes he can play a role in enlarging his father's public stature. But in so doing, he will destroy him, achieving his father's aim of starting a Civil War as well as (nominally) freeing himself.

Owen now pushes his father to "action, action, action," and Banks holds our attention remarkably well moving through the bloody battles over Free Soil in Kansas, and then the final raid on Harpers Ferry. Indeed Banks employs the word "bloody" time and time again in the latter third of Cloudsplitter. The sky has now fallen. Poor southern farmers who do not own slaves are dragged out of their cabins and hacked to pieces as their families cower inside. Significantly, Captain Brown does not raise his sword. In Banks' retelling, the sons raise their weapons and cut these other fathers down, in one case "splashing [the victim's] son next to him . . . with his father's blood."

Captain Brown is hanged after the failed raid on Harpers Ferry, an event Banks barely mentions. This, after all, is not a work about martyrs, but men. Owen does little to assist his father in the final raid, and feels tinges of guilt for this inaction. He escapes, but like the murdered son in Kansas, is splashed with his father's blood. Near the beginning of Cloudsplitter Owen recounts returning to the Brown farm in Massachusetts and staring into a recently dug grave next to his father's memorial stone. He feels "an almost irresistible tug, a pull beyond yearning to go forward and enter it, to step off this too solid earth into blackness, as if taking that final step were as simple as walking through the portal of one room into the next."

Captain Brown is Ahab to Owen's Ishmael, the self-named isolato, another orphan compelled to write his master's story, infusing pathos where there may have been rebuke. Cloudsplitter's epigraph, ". . . and I only am escaped alone to tell thee" (Job 1:16), is identical to the first line of Melville's celebrated epilogue. It is as if Banks self-consciously begins where Moby Dick leaves off, moving from sea to "this too solid earth," from elusive questions of paternity and race to those terrifyingly grounded and real.

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Race is as central to Banks' concerns in Cloudsplitter as fathers and sons; and they may be related. The analogy seems (intentionally) forced. At one point Owen admits to feeling like a "slave" to his father. His is a predetermined role, and because of the framing device employed, never once do we get the sense that Owen can walk away from the Old Man.

Even if he wanted to escape, Owen's moral sense would not allow it. He agrees with his father that the cause of abolition is "the one question more than any other that a white man revealed the true nature of his character," and being that father and cause necessarily go hand in hand, the son can not abandon one without abandoning the other.

One of the most fulfilling activities in Owen's life involves carrying fugitive slaves to Canada and freedom on the Underground Railroad. These journeys and much of the Browns' dealings with slavery continually reenact the scene on the steps after Owen's mother's death. Father and son are in the "same position," "back straight" as to their moral obligation to free the slaves.

But despite this similarity, they still do not speak. Owen does not tell his father that his antislavery zeal is buttressed by his own desire for freedom and the Old Man fails to tell his son that his obsession serves to bury his own paternal failings under the guise of fervent righteousness.

Banks does not condemn John Brown the father completely, however. The novel is strongest, in fact, where we watch his endless struggle to balance his obligations to family and cause, exacerbated by social class. The Old Man listens to Emerson in Boston, "his large, workingman's hands and wrists sticking out from his sleeves." Rhetoric for Emerson, sacrifice was a tangible reality for men like Brown.

When he attempts to ferry fugitive slaves across the border, he loses days of work needed to pay off the debts on his farm. Again, Owen sits beside his father in Emerson's audience; but this time he feels "sorry" for the Old Man, who looks "surprisingly diminished" in the crowd.

It is a turning point for Owen who now realizes he can play a role in enlarging his father's public stature. But in so doing, he will destroy him, achieving his father's aim of starting a Civil War as well as (nominally) freeing himself.

Owen now pushes his father to "action, action, action," and Banks holds our attention remarkably well moving through the bloody battles over Free Soil in Kansas and the final raid on Harpers Ferry. Indeed Banks employs the word "bloody" time and time again in the latter third of Cloudsplitter. The sky has now fallen. Poor southern farmers who do not own slaves are dragged out of their cabins and hacked to pieces as their families cower inside.

Significantly, Captain Brown does not raise his sword. In Banks' retelling, the sons raise their weapons and cut these other fathers down, in one case "splashing [the victim's] son next to him . . . with his father's blood."

Captain Brown is hanged after the failed raid on Harpers Ferry, an event Banks barely mentions. This, after all, is not a work about martyrs, but men. Owen does little to assist his father in the final raid, and feels tinges of guilt for this inaction. He escapes, but like the murdered son in Kansas, is splashed with his father's blood.

Near the beginning of Cloudsplitter Owen recounts returning to the Brown farm in Massachusetts and staring into a recently dug grave next to his father's memorial stone. He feels "an almost irresistible tug, a pull beyond yearning to go forward and enter it, to step off this too solid earth into blackness, as if taking that final step were as simple as walking through the portal of one room into the next."

Captain Brown is Ahab to Owen's Ishmael, the self-named isolato, another orphan compelled to write his master's story, infusing pathos where there may have been rebuke. Cloudsplitter's epigraph, ". . . and I only am escaped alone to tell thee" (Job 1:16), is identical to the first line of Melville's celebrated epilogue. It is as if Banks self-consciously begins where Moby Dick leaves off, moving from sea to "this too solid earth," from elusive questions of paternity and race to those terrifyingly grounded and real.