SOURCE: Appleby, Joyce. “After Harpers Ferry.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4964 (22 May 1998): 7.

In the following review, Appleby derides the character of Owen, the narrator of Cloudsplitter, contending that Banks asks the character to do too much within the novel.

Slavery and its legacies have never been far from the American political consciousness. The Boston town meeting called to protest against the British Stamp Act in 1765 passed a resolution calling for an end to slavery, so keenly did the protesters feel the contradiction between the much-talked-of rights of Englishmen and the colonists' enslavement of Africans. Once independence had been won, anti-slavery societies popped up everywhere—North and South. Taking seriously the natural-rights philosophy articulated in the Declaration of Independence, Northern reformers began agitating for the repeal of the state laws that had created property in human beings. A system of coerced labour which had been introduced into the British colonies...