[Here’s the latest in an ongoing series of reviews of all of Lloyd Alexander’s non-Prydain books. To see all posts in this series, click on the “Lloyd Alexander” tag.]

“Let me tell you about men,” complains the wizard Stephanus to Lionel, his restless and talkative cat. “Wolves are gentler. Geese are wiser. Jackasses have better sense.” Despite these warnings, Lionel persists: he wants to be a person. In The Cat Who Wished to Be a Man, Lloyd Alexander follows Lionel’s adventures as he get his wish and trades the secluded wizard’s cottage for the clamor and conflict of the town—and all the contradictions and complexities of being human.

Published in 1973, five years after the end of the Prydain series, this slim comic novel invites comparisons to Alexander’s longer, richer works. Several characters are less interesting versions of old favorites: Stephanus, the cranky wizard, could be Dallben in a particularly bad mood, and the dubious Dr. Tudbelly, a traveling purveyor of “exilirs, tinctures, and unguents” who sprinkles his speech with misused Latin, could have been understudy to Fflewdur Fflam. Although The Cat Who Wished to Be a Man never fails to entertain, its love story is simple, its innkeeper-heroine is underdeveloped, and its overall comic sensibility diminishes the dramatic tension by ensuring that our heroes are rarely in any real danger.

Fortunately, that comic sensibility distinguishes this little novel by giving Alexander opportunities for social commentary and allowing him to develop, in 107 pages, his own philosophy of human nature. Take Mayor Pursewig, the crime boss who rules the town of Brightford by intimidating the locals with legalese:

“These two, knowingly, willingly, and with malice aforethought, removed their corporeal presence from an interriparian structure for the purpose of absconding without disbursement of a legally constituted financial obligation.”

“What he says,” Dr. Tudbelly muttered to the puzzled Lionel, “is that we crossed Brightford Bridge without paying any toll.”

“But we didn’t cross the bridge,” Lionel protested. “We jumped off. And the reason we jumped off is that were were being shot at with those things called crossbows.”

Pursewig owns the bridge, operates its tollgates, and holds the mortgages to half of Brightford’s houses, but he maintains his power by operating outside the law. He floods his competitors’ basements with rats, detains out-of-towners, presides over kangaroo courts, and sentences the “guilty” to thumbscrews. Amusingly, although the township’s lawful government eventually sorts out this mess, Alexander sees the council members as the arbiters of last resort. Well-meaning but clueless, they are so cloistered, and so distracted by Pursewig’s proposal for a new tax on window-panes, that they have no idea how badly their people have suffered.

Despite social critiques that could shade into cynicism, Alexander resists taking a dim view of human nature, opting instead for a pleasantly comic perspective. He once wrote that his books deal with “how we learn to be genuine human beings,” and The Cat Who Wished to Be a Man explores that notion at its most literal. Lionel seems at first to be a tabula rasa: he learns to walk, he struggles to put on clothing, and he misunderstands figurative expressions such as “You’ll eat a big slice of humble pie.” But the former cat is not without human instincts: he is bemused by the corrupt mayor’s manipulations of the legal system, angered by human discourtesy, and shocked when his enemies attempt to murder him. At times, he is tempted to steal and kill—but in the end, he chooses to save a life.

As far as Lloyd Alexander is concerned, even a brand-new human can recognize the difference between good behavior and bad. Decency and cruelty are both innately human traits, but so is the ability to distinguish between them. Lionel’s mastery of his new, competing human instincts should hearten young readers who will soon face moral choices of their own. The hope Alexander offers them belies the misanthropic dictum of Lionel’s former owner: “Be glad you are a cat.”

When Lloyd Alexander died last year, everyone talked about how much they loved the Prydain books when they were children. Alexander will always be remembered for that series, but while we, his former readers, grew up and moved on, he continued to write for us—and not just the occasional novel, either, but more than two dozen books over 35 years. I’ve already written about his wonderful autobiographical novel, The Gawgon and the Boy. In the months to come, I’ll continue to read his less familiar books and post brief reviews of each one. To see all posts in this series, click on the “Lloyd Alexander” tag.]

Lidi is a charlatan; people pay her money to fool them. “They understand that it’s just make-believe,” explains the heroine of Lloyd Alexander’s 2002 novel The Rope Trick. “[I]t makes life easier to put up with. It’s consoling.” Lidi, alas, is the only one who’s not consoled by magic. As she roams the roads of Campania performing sleight-of-hand for gullible villagers, the young magician obsessively searches for the secret to the one trick her bitter father swore she wasn’t skilled enough to learn: the famous last illusion of Ferramondo, who was rumored to have thrown a rope into the air, climbed it—and disappeared.

Even in his seventies, Alexander remained a humane and genial writer, but in The Rope Trick his whimsy is eerily muted. Protagonists in his other novels often find their tunnel vision mitigated by wise and pithy companions, but when Lidi is presented with typically Lloyd-Alexandrian statements about the inherent quirkiness of the world, her responses are notable for their lack of humor:

“I have to find a magician named Ferramondo. He’s the only one who knows how to do the trick.
“I’m looking for a town—Montalto,” she added. “He might be there.”
“You shouldn’t have any trouble,” Julian said. “We only have a few dozen Montaltos. It means ‘high mountain.’ So if a town has a bump in the road, it gets called Montalto, and everybody walks up and down admiring it. A crazy country, but we like it that way.”
“My father told me it was in the south.”
“Ah,” Julian said. “That makes things easier. In the south, they only have maybe ten or twelve Montaltos. That cuts it down a little.”
“I’ll find it.”

From Lidi’s obsessive quest to prove her dead father wrong to suggestions of abuse suffered by the child savant she rescues from a roadside tavern, The Rope Trick is darker than readers of Alexander’s early novels might expect. The pseudo-Italian world of Campania is populated by characters who are haunted, scarred, mistreated, or lost. Despite the presence of Alexander’s latest good-hearted charlatan, a circus ringmaster with a troupe of dancing piglets, the novel’s villain firmly establishes the tone of the book: he steals from poor farmers, shoots a man in cold blood, and horsewhips a peasant for fun.

Fortunately, The Rope Trick isn’t dreary; it’s a mature work by a children’s novelist who doesn’t talk down to adults. As Lidi and her companions hear bizarre and conflicting stories about Ferramondo, their quest for the fabled magician becomes a genuinely engaging mystery. Alexander also weaves a love story into The Rope Trick as Lidi falls for Julian, a fugitive who longs to take revenge on a corrupt overseer. In keeping with the book’s determined melancholy, Alexander sets an obstacle between the couple in the form of their one shared and potentially tragic trait: an obsessiveness that threatens their instinct to love.

With its quibbling lovers forced to compromise and mature as they confront injustice, The Rope Trick seems to tell a typical Lloyd Alexander story, until something even more magical happens: a strange and beautiful ending unlike anything in Alexander’s better-known novels. The Rope Trick affirms that a magic trick really can be the greatest consolation, although not in the literal way the heroine has come to expect. Exploring the spiritual dimension of life, a topic largely absent in his earliest novels, Alexander redeems his heroes and refutes their cynicism, but he does so with undiplomatic truths about the secrets to living well, baldly stating that some people “get it” while others never will.

The Rope Trick must have baffled many of the children to whom it was marketed; surely the book left some parents scratching their heads. The novel was touted as children’s fantasy only because the author was an acknowledged master of the genre, but The Rope Trick is the sort of fable for grown-ups that only an old man could write. Alexander’s most clever young readers will treasure this story, but only in retrospect, when they’re old enough, and troubled enough by life, to understand it.