His faith goes marching on? The Good Lord Bird

James McBride's novel The Good Lord Bird is in that tradition of an historical narrative told by an obscure spectator, a witness to events who had little, or perhaps little-known, effect on those events - Confederate Widow, Nat Turner, would be two other examples - and if I remember correctly, wasn't Nat Turner also about John Brown's futile insurrection? In any event, that's what McBride's narrative is about - the story being told by a an old man dictating his memoirs to a fellow congregant (the manuscript found 150 years later under floorboards in the church): the narrator looks back to the time he was quite young, a hermaphroditic black boy who dresses like a girl, is kept in slavery in a Kansas town, and gets liberated by one of John Brown's band and spirited off to be with the marauders as the wander through rural Kansas trying to free slaves and terrorize the slave-holding populace. Who isn't curious about John Brown and his gang - one of the strangest stories in American history, a guy so weirdly committed to an obviously just cause and so radical as to be completely ineffective. I have no idea how much research McBride did or how accurate, in outline or detail (narrator aside), the narrative might be. My first impressions, however, are that McBride has the comic vernacular down as well as any writer I can think of this side of Twain; if I had a copy in hand I'd quote a few salient lines, but there are many great turns of phrase - angry five minutes after breakfast is one that sticks - and it's the voice, or the voices, that propel the narrative further. Brown, in his telling, is much like Don Quixote, devoted to a noble cause but deranged and delusional - praying for hours on end, a tyrant to has five fighting sons. Not sure if that portrayal is accurate, quite possibly it is, but it does seem a diminution of a very brave and idealistic man. That said, though Brown seems Quixotic, the narrative does not, in first 100 pages or so, have the vitality of DQ - we don't really sense the danger that the characters may be in, and, in part because Brown is so unstable the narrative doesn't have a clear drive - they're not driven by a sense of mission, as are the obsessed characters in say Cormac McCarthy. McBride's strength isn't sense of place but voice, and that may be enough.