text: This is a first person account of a trip to the arctic in the 1860's narrated by a Civil War deserter.  Within the first few pages, our hero enlists, pilfers letters off battlefield corpses, deserts, is injured in NYC draft riots, ends up in New Bedford, MA and signs up on a sailing ship without ryhme or reason or knowing where it was going.  The book was downhill from there.
  
  Page after page described ice and the crew's interminable struggles to get through.  Getting through the book was nearly as interminable.
  
  The reader never gets to know the narrator enough to empathize with him, or really understand him at all.  Thus, his struggles ring hollow and he evokes no sympathy during his struggles.
  
  There are elements of fantasy in the book.  Not enough to make it a fantasy, but enough to steer a reader off course.  The scientist on the mission is after a warm Garden of Eden in the middle of the Arctic.  He is mad or it's fantasy, it is hard to know until the end.  There is a fantasy interlude when a character who has three hands (the most likeable character in the book) describes how he got his third hand.  From that yarn comes the title "Rope Eater".  The title really has nothing to do with the book, other than rope eaters and the crew members suffered pain.
  
  Besides the tedious turning of the plot, the characters lack any development.  Only the three handed man and the captain, both tangential characters, had any depth whatsoever.
  
  This book seemed to be an attempt at adventure, but not enough happened between the interminable accounts of ice to build much tension.  It never developed the aspect of the deterioration of the characters - mentally and physically - it just happened.  Although the reader knew the characters must be suffering, it never came through the over-writing.
  
  As one might expect, the crew's mission to find the warm Garden of Eden in the arctic was pointless.  So was this book.  It was a disappointment.
  
  