Any American with an interest in history would have an opinion on the abolitionist John Brown (1800-59), opinions as extreme as the man himself. Saint or madman, possibly both, Brown set off on a crusade to end slavery, a venture that remains shrouded in mystery yet is recognised as a contribution to the outbreak of the Civil War. One of America's finest novelists, Russell Banks, has approached the story as fiction rather than history and the result is suitably epic on a biblical scale. Cloudsplitter (Secker & Warburg, £16.99 in UK), at nearly 800 pages, is long - dangerously long.
Told through the voice of Brown's maverick son Owen, a self-confessed liar, the narrative is anecdotal and personal but is also, more importantly, a confessional memoir and ultimately a suicide note. Nothing can deflect the moral weight which Banks brings to the story. Now an old man, Owen remembers his life with his father. While recounting the family history in suspiciously lengthy epistolary instalments to assist a young researcher, Owen also confesses his own sins and regrets.
The theme of sin is essential to the novel. From the outset, Banks uses biblical rhetoric that is particularly apt, as his John Brown might have strode from the pages of the Old Testament. Dominated by his father's presence, Owen has lived a shadow-life which he is convinced began with the death of his mother; he refers to himself at that time as "a small boy who suddenly saw things about his life and circumstances that until then had been invisible to him". Denied a childhood and real love, he is later incapable of either loving or befriending. The text resounds with sins, guilt, punishment and forgiveness. Around the quiet agonies of silent, suffering women and his adoring children rages John Brown's ambitions, obsessions and erratic behaviour.
While Banks is careful not to interfere with history, he does select episodes which act as plausible explanations of Brown's character and motivations. The book follows him from unsuccessful farmer to terrorist and, finally, martyr. "Until Mother died," reports Owen, "we Browns had been to all appearances a normal family of our time and place, if a bit overly strict in matters of religion. After that, we became like some ancient Hebrew tribe of wanderers and suffers, burdened by the death of women and children and by our endless obligations to our father's restless, yet implacable God."
The family story is a litany of dead children. In a way the family's tragedy acts as a metaphor for America as a young country corrupted by its loss of innocence. Amidst scenes of grief and illness and financial disaster, there are few interludes of pleasure or even ordinary domestic routine, aside from the comedy of watching father shave. Most events are momentous; when the young Owen steals his grandfather's watch he is later punished by John Brown who then instructs the boy to beat him in turn for "as much as you've failed me as a son, I've failed you as a father". The simple act of an evening bath ends appallingly when a small child is scalded to death. Owen recalls hearing "a horrible yowl, the cry of a wild animal, not that of a human being, and not so much a cry of pain as an enraged, savage shriek".
Having repeatedly succeeded in breaking the Sunday curfew imposed on the household, Owen, sneaking out on a roof and leaping to freedom, finally slips, smashing his arm. Crippled for life, Owen knows his father views the outcome as an act of divine justice.
Fascinated by the sequence of events as well as Brown's righteous gestures, Banks consistently sacrifices the mundane for the profound. It is a haunted, harrowing, almost ritualistic book. Owen himself is clearly imprisoned by the love he has for his father. In all, John Brown fathered twenty children with two wives, only eight lived to adulthood. "Father," recalls Owen, "viewed himself and others in that peculiarly vivid, Biblical light from early in his life, for he had been a devout and an unusually imaginative Christian since boyhood, when he had practically memorised the entire Bible".
The sense of God and religion evoked by the novel is fatalistic, violent, terrifying. Banks's tone is neutral, and the language alternates between contemporary and biblical. In Owen's recollections from the distant past there is no joy and scant happiness: John Brown best demonstrates his love for his children as they lie ill or dying. Owen's self-hatred is the legacy of a guilt created by his feeling unworthy of his patriarchal father's oppressive religion.
Like a lost tribe the family are ever on the move, initially as a result of John Brown's various business failures. Many deals go wrong, and for much of the book John Brown is more preoccupied by money than by noble acts. Neither Owen nor Banks loses sight of the sense of biblical odyssey which shape the story. "We were not living in Ohio, but in Canaan, not in Pennsylvania, but among the Philistines, not in Massachusetts, but in Pharaoh's Egypt."
Early in the novel, Owen refers to the fact that his father is considered a great man: "I'm not so sure I agree," he counters. "If greatness is merely great fame and is defined by an ability to arouse strong feelings of an entire people for many generations, then father, like Caesar, like Napoleon and Lincoln, was indeed a great man." Throughout the novel, Owen shrewdly analyses his father's behaviour, and asks: "But who amongst your new, young historians and biographers, even amongst those who loathe him or think him mad, has considered the price paid for that sort of greatness by those who were his family?" John Brown for Owen is the essence of everything, "the darker side of our family's strength. When the Old Man went down, we all went down." On the subject of forgiveness Owen is understandably ambivalent. "There was so much that I could not understand about this man, my father, and the life we led because of him - my thoughts, my questions, were blocked, occluded: by the absolute rightness of his cause, which none of us could question."
Owen's testament is eloquent and thoughtful. It is his story he tells, not his father's. The methodology Banks employs makes for a powerful, compelling story rather than convincing fiction. Author of Affliction (1989), The Sweet Here-after (1991) and Rule of the Bone (1995), among others, Russell Banks has always been possessed of an authentic narrative voice. This time, the device is not as certain. Owen the ancient hermit as witness is not wholly plausible, he is too modern, his knowledge too encyclopaedic; but Cloudsplitter is almost as magnificent as it is monumental.
