by JULIET WATERS

In Russell Banks' complex, brilliant-but-sombre historical novels there's always a moment I think of as his "playful name drop." When I pointed this out to Banks, in Montreal last week to promote The Darling, he laughed. He's one of the first to admit that "playful" is not a word anyone would ever use to describe his fiction.

In his 1999 novel, Cloudsplitter, it's a brief encounter with a fictional niece of Nathaniel Hawthorne that lightly implies that Hawthorne might have been drawing from life experience in his seminal novel about adultery, The Scarlet Letter. In The Darling, it's in a letter that heroine Hannah Musgrave receives from her mother, while Hannah, a student activist on the FBI's most-wanted list, is hiding out in West Africa.

The year is 1977 and her mother, the WASPish wife of a famous Dr. Spock-type paediatrician mentions a white-water rafting trip with "Bibby and Marsh Mansfield and John Kerry and his lovely wife (he's a young Kennedy-type liberal Democrat running for Congress in the 5th district, a man who many of us think has presidential potential, certainly more than Teddy, but don't get me started there)."

Banks explains: "When I put that in I didn't know Kerry was going to run for president." By this he means run in 2004. "I knew Kerry in the '70s when he was the leader of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and I knew John was going to run for president. Then [laughs] we had dinner together, we inhaled together, he was a real guy, and I thought a real courageous man, and I really did admire him. It was courageous for a guy like him to oppose the war in '71, '72, '73… it was easier later on."

Coming from Banks, a founding member of his campus chapter of SDS, one of the most radical student activist groups of the '60s and '70s, this is no liberal fawning. "There's a direct link in my mind to Hannah Musgrave because of his activism and also because of the restraints he had on him… They have very similar backgrounds, a privileged boy brought up in a hot-house environment with distant and cold parents, it sounds like. You can see there's a polarity in John that's like Hannah, a pull between achievement in the conventional sense, and a desire to sabotage the very privilege he was born to. In some ways it makes him look like a "flip flopper," as Bush keeps calling him, but it's because he sees both sides."

Hannah, for all her deep flaws - and there are many in this unliveable but compelling character - certainly sees both sides. From the "work and arts" summer camp, where her small-l liberal parents send her, to Chicago and the radical campus politics of the early '70s, to Liberia, a bizarre and inept U.S. experiment in forced democracy in Africa. This is where Hannah meets her husband and her true love, a gang of endangered chimpanzees. It's where her three sons will become bloodthirsty teen soldiers, and it's where she will find herself on September 10, 2001, about to step on a plane back to the U.S.

While it might seem a stretch to forge a link between September 11, the '70s, chimpanzees and the complexities of African politics, Banks, a modern-day master at the "heart of darkness" genre of dark psycho-historical thrillers, pulls it off. He started the work of staring into the souls of America's domestic terrorists in Cloudsplitter when he fictionalized the life of John Brown, the 19th-century civil rights martyr. But while Cloudsplitter was a challenging and ultimately satisfying read, it was relentlessly bleak and often difficult. The Darling is dark, but there's a suspense and an energy created in part by Banks' willingness to attempt the voice of a radical feminist character. This takes real courage too, and hopefully The Darling will achieve its well-merited share of admiration.

The Darling by Russell Banks, Knopf Canada, hc, 400pp, $35