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.