Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay very much worth a second look (or read)

I didn't weep as much the second time I read Tigana as I did the first time over 10 years ago.  There are few books that will still cause me to catch my breath in sections, especially ones that I am rereading, however after 10 years of sitting on my shelf it still had the power to take my breath away at least once.
Kay is a romantic writer.  I don't mean that in the sense that there are a fair number of people wandering around with frilly bodices being ripped this way and that.  I mean Romantic with a capital "R" as in larger-than-life people who are very earnest and feel things very deeply.  The voice of each narrator sets the stage for how the reader will perceive the story.  The narrator of Tigana, like Tolkien who was a very large and early influence on Kay as he was one of the contributors to The Silmarillion, is a very serious person on the whole who states things in a seriousness usually only attributed to a teen in the throes of their first love.
The story here is a very serious one.  That is of a peninsula on a far planet where magic, while not quite common, is prevalent enough.  This peninsula resembles a renaissance Italy where the Medici or the Borgia might reign except there is magic and two moons.  There are nine provinces of the palm, which is the way that this peninsula is referred to,  and as the prologue opens they are invaded from the West by one sorcerer king and from the East by another sorcerer.  Each captures 4 of the provinces and achieves a stable detente with the other.  In the process, the King of the west loses his son in the battle over one of the provinces.  In his anger and sorrow, he casts a dreadful spell causing all who were not born there to forget the name of this province and to not even be able to hear it if it was spoken to them.  A very dreadful form of historic revisionism that was inspired, so the author states in his postscript, by the Stalin/Maoist historical revisions of the last forty years.
Our earnest and serious heroes must try to find a way to pit the two tyrants against each other and thus destroy them both, which of course they do. But there are ancient legends told along the way, a few deaths by overly well intentioned people who sacrificed in a good cause or for whom the climax of the events was more than they could live with.
As a sometimes serious and earnest person, I enjoyed this book immensely again the second time.  The surprise turns here and there still held some magic for me.  However, I can see that an earnest younger man might find this novel to be almost more than he could absorb.  Thus is the power of the epic carried forward.  This work was the first full work of Kay's that I had read (other than the editing of Tolkien's writing).  I had read quite a bit more of his work after this and found it to be improved.  Still very earnest, but with more humor, which as Shakespeare knew was the perfect accoutrement for a romantic drama.

Cloudsplitter by Russell Banks is strangely dated

As I pondered what Russell Banks was trying to do in his recasting of the events leading up to John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, I had to remind myself that the novel was written pre-9/11.  Now, I am not a person who continually refers to 9/11 as a benchmark event for all matters.  "Honey, they were out of Cherrios at the store today.  Must be more fallout from 9/11."  However, when you are writing a novel about terrorists, particularly a novel that attempts to remold our impression of one of America's leading homegrown terrorists, I think 9/11 does have something in which to reflavor our perception of this work.
Written from the viewpoint of Owen Brown, thought to be perhaps the only survivor of the raid, it sets the narrative many years past Harpers Ferry when a scholar is attempting to write the authoritative biography of John Brown and has an assistant seek Owen out as the last man standing.  Owen retells many of the events of the preceeding decade or so from his perpection as he sits in hiding in a shack in the California wilderness where he has been living in hiding from the previous fifty years.
Initially, I was interested in knowing what events happened to cause Owen to be the only survivor.  I admired Banks' ability to not let me know where he was going.  I knew that Owen would suvive, but what would cause him to abandon his father at that critical time.  Banks gave us many possible reasons, but when the novel finally wound its way to that part of the story, I was disappointed with the pragmatic and non-climactic handling of that event for which we had followed the author for the previous 700+ pages.  As a reader, I was left with the everyman-ness of that decision.  That I would make a similar decision in the same circumstances.  It was disappointingly pragmatic and caused me to question why Owen would continue to beat himself up for it for the next fifty years.  From the story, he had so many other things to feel guilty over - a rape of a Irish street girl, the accidental killing of a good friend by his hand,  the coveting of his friend's wife.  These are events that he had control over - unlike his leaving under fire at Harpers Ferry - and thus should feel more guilty about.  As someone nearing middle-age, I know that I feel the most guilty for the things that I could have controlled rather than the things that happened that were bad but were basically out of my control.
But this still brings me back to what Banks was trying to accomplish with the novel.  It is a well-crafted work.  The 750+ pages whirl by.  He neither lapses into an overly colloqial voice nor attempts to modernize and thus anachronise the speech.  A nice balance, I thought; one in which I was able to believe I was hearing the story told to me 50 years after the events described.    It was quite a stretch to believe that Owen could have written it.  It was so well written, in the first person, that it would be hard to believe a man with no formal education, who had been living in hiding and seclusion for almost his entire life, could write so well or with such a breadth of vocabulary. 
John Brown was recast many times in the 150 years since Harpers Ferry.  First as a devil (by the south), then as a martyr (by the north), then as a crazy, deluded religious simpleton.  This had been the prevailing opinion for a hundred years - however Banks' novel and other works at the same time have caused people to view him in a different and more sympathetic light and this was the part I struggled with the most.  I do believe that it would be incorrect to view Brown as naive and/or crazy.  Religous, yes. A terrorist, certainly.  But in a post-9/11 world, it is near impossible for me to empathize with someone who believed that violence was ever a proper method of changing public opinion.  The man who swings first always loses.
I think the Brown story has many aspects that could have been reviewed and I think it would be interesting to look at many what-ifs in that context.  But I think Banks really missed an opportunity to highlight that violence is not an acceptable way to get people's attention to an issue.  If he had written it a few years later, I wonder what he would have had Owen Brown say.