The Good Lord Bird, by James McBride – review

James McBride’s The Good Lord Bird is set in the mid 19th century, and is based on the real life of John Brown, the one who lies a-mouldering in his grave. Recently it won a National Book Award in the USA. Brown, the Old Man, was a religious fanatic who believed that he had the nod from God to free the slaves. Early in his harum-scarum life he killed and beheaded some pro-slavery opponents with God’s sanction; like many fanatics he had a direct line to the Almighty. But it all ended in tragedy when, with his small band of followers, very few of whom were slaves, he took a federal government arsenal at Harper’s Ferry in West Virginia. The plan was to distribute thousands of guns to the ‘negroes’ (as McBride calls them). It was an utter disaster, which ended with Brown being arrested and hanged a few months later. Strangely enough, the legend of John Brown, who was clearly crazy, helped the abolitionist cause and is thought to have precipitated the American Civil War. This is not the first novel about Brown. Russell Banks wrote a great book called Cloudspitter, using one of Brown’s sons, Owen, as the narrator of his father’s tragic life; in The Good Lord Bird, McBride, a musician and novelist, enlists an entirely fictional character called Onion, a boy of about 12, to tell the story. For some reason that is never explained, Onion is dressed as the daughter of a slave, and John Brown takes charge of the child, whom he regards as a talisman. This is not the only rather arbitrary plot device. The book appears to be very random, as though the author and his editor had failed to spot that there are a troublesome number of repetitions and inconsistencies.