Ben Jones’ debut novel, The Rope Eater, is a bleak, often poetic and frequently beautiful meditation on alienation, madness and the conflict between science and spirituality, occasionally marred by heavy-handed and oblique symbolism, debut-novel pretentiousness, and a stock villain straight out of Central Casting.  The first third of the book is, as Rumsfeld might say, a long, hard slog.  It took me three weeks to get through those one hundred pages, but only one night to finish the rest.

            Brendan Kane is a soldier from the Union Army who deserts after a particularly horrific battle.  He drifts north through the New York of the late 1860’s, where he is caught up in the Draft Riots, to New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he signs on as a sailor with a mysterious expedition to the Arctic.  The crew is made up of convicts and outcasts, led by a disgraced captain and financed by a reclusive, pianola-playing eccentric named West.  After weeks at sea, the ship’s destination is revealed to be a “temperate archipelago in the heart of the Arctic,” a “lush Garden of Eden,” which is probably, in fact, a myth.  This comes as a surprise and a bitter disappointment to the crew, who had believed they were sailing for gold or whales. 

            The ill-fated mission continues north, into the bleak ice fields of the Arctic, where the crew must contend with treacherously low temperatures, violent storms, fatigue, depression and maddening boredom.  After abandoning ship in the ice pack, the men are reduced to virtual automatons, rotting on their feet as they trudge through the deadly cold.  All of the men of the expedition save Kane and the ships’ doctor, Architeuthis, eventually freeze, starve to death, or go mad. 

            All of this is related in meticulous detail, with bleakly poetic imagery and utterly austere language.  The plotting is deliberate, but compelling and Jones’ characters are complex and realistic with one exception, the scientist, Architeuthis.  At the beginning of the voyage, Architeuthis is obsessed with the measuring and mapping of water temperature and salinity, wind speed and direction, and air pressure.  As the journey progresses, he morphs into a mustache-twirling villain in the mad scientist mode, complete with satanic grinning, a willingness to sacrifice his fellow crewmembers to his quest, and even cannibalism (the doctor uses an autopsy as a cover story for this). 

            In the novel’s thematic conflict between science and spirituality, Jones stacks the deck against science by demonizing Architeuthis.  Jones intimates that the scientist has harvested the organs of the autopsied man and boiled them down into a concentrated protein paste to feed to the other crewmembers after the ship moves into the Arctic Circle, where food will be scarce.  Before being allowed to perform this autopsy, he and Captain Griffin engage in a long argument.  Architeuthis wins the argument with the Captain and is allowed to perform the autopsy, but is described as “snorting,” and “harsh” in the process, thereby revealing the narrator’s, and I believe, the author’s view.  Jones seems to argue that modern science has led humanity into a spiritual wasteland.  In Jones’ novel, the lone man of science is largely responsible for leading his fellow crewmembers into a frozen and brazenly metaphorical wasteland.

            The first part of the book, where Kane is introduced (the part that took me three weeks to slog through), is its weakest section.  It manages to seem both interminable and rushed, as Jones describes Kane’s upbringing and begins to develop a metaphor, Kane’s enlarged heart, which is awkward and insufficiently explored. 

            But once past the introduction, once Kane signs on to the Narthex and the journey is undertaken, the narrative begins to acquire a stately momentum and a grim fascination as Jones introduces the oddball crew of the ship, and the horror and uncertainty of their mission unfolds. 

            Throughout the novel, Jones channels various celebrated chroniclers of the dangerous and the bizarre, from Melville and Poe, most obviously, to Paul Bowles (although without Bowles’ submerged homoeroticism).  Jones never succumbs to imitation and  always maintains a distinctive, stark voice.  The descriptions of the almost biblically violent storms and the scenes of the men struggling for survival in their tiny, improvised shelters and the tattered remnants of their clothes are particularly effective. 

            Jones’ debut has been very well received, enjoying sparkling notices in The New York Times, The Washington Post and The New Yorker and it’s easy to see why.  The book is challenging and well researched, if somewhat self-consciously Important, addressing Large Themes in quasi-mythological terms.  The Rope Eater is a work of real literature and if Ben Jones can keep his pretentiousness in check, he should have a long productive career ahead of him.