The Ropemaker

One of my all-time favorite fantasy novels. Couldn't put it down.

Peter Dickinson is the grand old man of young adult fiction, and The Ropemaker - mostly - is a good demonstration of why. His tale opens with a bang and the pace rarely lets up, though this does lead to some slight structural issues near the end.

Talja has lived in the valley her whole life.

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Sandwiched between a glacial mountain range and a forest impassable to men, the valley has been at peace for twenty generations. But something is wrong, and Talja - along with her grandmother and two others - is going to have the leave the valley before their peace is irrevocably shattered.

Something I really loved about this book: Dickinson doesn't condescend to his younger readers, and his prose is mature, cinematic, and free of the heavy exposition, genre fads, and patronising that can sink lesser YA writers. His characters are believable and well-drawn, and his world feels tactile and established - something the characters fall into, rather than a hasty construction built on spec just for them.

There's a lot of magic in The Ropemaker, and whilst it lacks the meticulous detail of Nix's Abhorsen trilogy, for example, I really enjoyed its power and immensity. Magicians are nothing short of demigods in The Ropemaker, and they protect their power zealously. These political undercurrents added a richness and maturity that I really appreciated - all the more so because it wasn't lost on its young protagonists.

Unfortunately, there is one issue that lets the book down: its ending. Dickinson has trouble with his climax; it's preceded by so much spectacular and exciting action, it's difficult for him to establish that _this is the one that really matters_. It's over very quickly, with a drawn-out denouement that's neither necessary, nor helpful in separating it as the final climax.

These issues are compounded by a practically deus ex machina villain and the feeling that it couldn't go any other way for the protagonists. There's a point two-thirds of the way through the book where the real climax happens, and everything after that lacks the immediacy and pleasurable surprise of what's preceded it.

A kid probably wouldn't notice or perhaps care about this so much, but I couldn't help feeling a few rewrites would have helped The Ropemaker finish at the level it started on - a very high level indeed. It doesn't invalidate the pleasure of this book, but it does lessen it somewhat, and bring it down from an excellent, to merely good.

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It was interesting to contrast this enjoyable, well-written YA fantasy book with Ursula LeGuin's "Voices," which I read recently. Both deal with a pair of young people from a remote, isolated valley, and their families.
While both situation and family are, in LeGuin's view, unrelentingly negative,

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to Dickinson, this situation is just positive as positive can be... as a matter of fact, the whole point of the book is that the young people and their grandparents must go on a quest to find a magician to preserve the spells that keep their valley isolated, cut off from the larger, socially and politically oppressive empire beyond....
LeGuin took the opposite view altogether, where the young people had to attempt to escape the oppressiveness of the backwards, backwater valley and get out to the wider world to grow...
As I said, however, Dickinson's writing was fun and the story enjoyable - but I did find myself questioning some of his situations.... probably because it's a YA book, and he didn't want to really get into them. But having a young teen boy and girl who obviously like each other go on a long trip together - and have NO sexual tension develop was unrealistic. And, having two very elderly people experience a magical spell that makes them both teens again, to have them fall in love - and then to have them voluntarily give that up and choose to become old again, without a whole lot of agony, is also totally unrealistic.

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Tilja and Tahl, along with their grandparents must make a perilous journey from their homes into the oppressive Empire to seek a magician. For 20 generations, their families have been responsible for keeping the forests and mountains surrounding the valley reinforced with the magic that protects

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them from the Empire's armies and tax collectors. But now the magic is waning.

A slow start to this 375 page book and there were sections when the journey seemed to drag. Action is fitful, pace is slow.

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Not my favorite Peter Dickinson. I was amused by the fact that we aren't introduced to the title character until about halfway through the book. While reading this, I wondered why he bothered to write it. I still don't know how old Tilja, the main character, is. Her specialness is her lack of magic

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in a magical land; she can absorb magic and make it go away. But Piers Anthony already has someone like this in Xanth, and those books are more fun. The book felt long and the worlds created did not make me learn more about this one. I did like the idea of an idyllic place with no history.

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Just plain awesome.

Not a huge fan of magical fantasy, but I enjoyed this YA novel with ice dragons and unicorns and ancient protection spells. The characters were likable and I enjoyed the journey with them.