Finally finished this ginormous tome, after dipping in and out of it for months. I have mixed feelings. Subject matter's fascinating, of course: radical abolitionist and Christian fundamentalist John Brown raises his family to be a cult of anti-slavery soldiers, culminating in the failed attempt at a slave revolt in Harpers Ferry, VA, one of the big "road to the Civil War" events in your American history textbooks. The big unasked/unanswered question the book poses is this: why did it take a religious nutjob kamikaze terrorist to take serious action against slavery? There were other white abolitionists, of course, but they were basically journalists and theoreticians, not men of action. The only white dude in America to hold true moral convictions about the evil of slavery was a mad dervish who murdered innocent people, then led himself and his sons on a Wild Bunch-style suicide mission.

Banks tells the tale from the perspective of Brown's son Owen, the only surviving member of the family circa the turn of the 20th century. The book is pretty much split between the story itself and Owen's running commentary on the story, in which he interjects thoughts about race relations in 19th-century America and the complex father-son relationship between Owen and the "Old Man," as he was known. (The three big themes running through the book are race, religion and daddy issues.) This running commentary is consistently interesting and beautifully written, Owen writing as an old hermit whose every waking minute is haunted by the past events he's relating. But the story itself...eeennnhhhh, I dunno. I'm not at all convinced it needed to take up 750 pages, I'll say that much. Episodes involving John Brown's financial woes are so boring it almost seems like a deliberate joke of boringness. When it finally gets to the killing -- first in the "Bleeding Kansas" wars to determine whether Kansas territory would go free or slave, then in Harpers Ferry -- the book gets bogged down in action sequences, which Banks doesn't write particularly well. But the reflections, the meta-story, made me think long and hard about race and family life in the 19th century, and the broader connection to today's religiously motivated terrorism is clear.

For Owen's voice, Banks adopts a purposefully stilted prose style meant to imitate both the general windbaggedness of 19th-century verbiage and John Brown's Biblical oratory. This style is often grating, and it's not without anachronistic usage, but it does help to immerse the reader in the world, and after living with the book for a while I found myself weirdly attached to the voice. What it comes down to is there's a lot of good juicy stuff here, but there's also waaaay too much padding. I believe this could have been a damn good, verging-on-great novel if Banks had kept it somewhere in the 300-400 page range.