This nightmarish tale of a seagoing adventure gone wrong has stuck with me ever since I read it over five years ago. Just after the Civil War, young Brendan Kane takes a two-year post aboard the mysterious Narthex, in search of a mythical paradise. The men in this adventure are brought to the edge of death and sanity, caused by hunger and a general loss of bearings. You’ll appreciate the sunshine and your next meal that much more after reading this novel. ( )

Brendan Kane, unhappy at home, soon found himself just as unhappy with the tavern job that he found himself working at age 17. So bored was he with this new life, that when a smooth talking recruiter for the Union Army came through town, Kane found himself marching away with those newly recruited to go south to fight the rebels of the Confederate States of America.

However, he soon discovered that war was not the great adventure that every young man imagined it would be and that he was just as likely as the next man to end up dead on the battle field. This was a realization that every soldier soon reached, and it was the reason that most of them pinned their names on their clothing and carried final letters to those at home in their pockets as they headed into battle. Kane became obsessed with those letters and made sure to collect as many of them as he could find after each of the battles fought by his unit. Upon finally reaching a breaking point, and deciding he had had enough, he carried dozens of those letters with him and handed them over to the postmaster of the small whaling town to which he had managed to make his way.

When despite his having no experience as a seaman, Kane was offered a job on the Narthex, a strangely ugly boat that was due to sail the next morning for the Arctic, he eagerly accepted the offer and saw it as the beginning of the next phase of his life. He soon found himself part of a crew of misfits, all of whom speculated about the purpose of the trip north and hoped to share in its expected profits.

By the time that the trip’s purpose was revealed to the crew it was too late for any of them to opt out, and they found themselves sailing farther and farther north alone as all of the whaling ships in the area headed for home. Day after day they were faced with the same daunting task of moving ever northward in the worst of weather and with nothing before them but a gray ocean that was becoming thicker and thicker with icebergs. The captain’s goal became less and less an interest to the crew as everyone aboard the ship came to realize that their survival was suddenly more an issue than was reaching their intended destination.

Ben Jones does a good job in describing the tediously repetitive existence of the crew as they struggled to stay afloat and to survive the extreme temperatures to which they were subjected. With no sunlight to break day from night, every hour seemed like the one before it and the one to come. Their minds became as numb as their hands and feet and they stayed alive as much from habit as from any conscious effort to save themselves.

Unfortunately, as a reader, I came to understand how they must have felt. I pushed through, from page to page, wondering if I would have the strength to see it through to the end and, if so, whether or not I would find that the trip had been worth such a supreme effort. Because there is such limited character development, I found that I really did not care who lived nor died. With one or two exceptions they were all the same to me. After reading this novel of almost three hundred pages, in which so little action took place, I was exhausted and wished I had never signed on for the trip.

Rated at: 2.0 ( )

An Arctic adventure story that never really grabbed me despite some vivid writing about scenes & psychological states. In the last half, the endless & repeated treks across the ice & huddling out storms in makeshift hovels as the characters' bodies deteriorate got repetitive & increasingly depressing, bounded only by the narrator's strong will to live. ( )

I am definitely going to have to read this book once more... I think I missed a lot this time around. This is definitely a very very good book, and I would definitely recommend it to patient readers.

Synopsis:
Set in the 1860s, the book is the story of Brendan Kane, who lives a rather dull life; his only major excursions are to the library. However, Kane wants more, and when he was 17, he left home, took a job at a tavern and then got caught up in patriotic rhetoric which led him to join the Union Army. However, disillusioned by the horrors of war going on all around him, he deserts, carrying nothing but a satchel full of soldiers' letters. He ends up in New York City, where he is caught up in mass rioting; at the post office where he is going to mail the letters, he is recruited once again...this time for a berth on a ship as a worker. The ship is called Narthex, and it was so weird looking and unconventional that it had to disembark from a small private harbor. Once on board, he notes that none of the crew have any possessions, much like himself; that they were all like him -- running from something with "nothing to lose."

In the second part of the story we find out where this ship is going. No one knows, and the crew speculates that perhaps they are going in search of some mine which will make them all rich. But here's the thing: they are actually making a trip past the known edge of the Arctic, to where
Dr. Architeuthis, a member of the group, a scientist, has deemed that there is some kind of temperate area, one where the water is warm and tropical trees grow. How he comes to this conclusion is actually funny, and leads the reader to believe that he is, in reality, insane. I won't give it away, in case someone decides to read the story. Suffice it to say, it is another example of insane ideas leading people to do things they would probably not ordinarily do. Like any other tale of Arctic adventure set in this time period, the expedition begins to encounter problems, including icebergs, shipwreck, incapacitating storms & starvation. The worse things get, the more the doctor wants to continue on with his explorations, to some gruesomely tragic consequences.

The title "The Rope Eater," is an expression of human survival. Kane makes friends with Aziz, who came from a group of people who lived in extreme poverty at the "edge of a vast black desert." Aziz relates a story to Kane in which some of the people, in exchange for chickens to keep them alive and other goods, gave their children to a group of traders who as it turns out were from the circus. The traders purposefully deformed them and exhibited them; later, the same traders showed the poor people how to do this to their own children by some horrifying means. Aziz's own father was a "rope eater," and to become a rope eater, the torture the children had to endure was indescribable. Aziz's mother did not want this for her son, so she hid him away with another family. After some years, the worst happens, Aziz is discovered, his dad wants to make him a rope-eater, and the only way he can survive intact is to strike out on his own with nothing. Eventually he finds his way into the below decks of the Narthex.

Now take that parable and run with it and you will begin to scratch the surface of this story.

So, okay...why did I give it a 4? Well, simply put, I always got the feeling that there was more to be had; that the story could have stretched a little deeper. However, it is a wonderful book, and one worth another read. ( )