Book review: Call of the Wild
Aug. 14th, 2011 04:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ivyficI did a bunch of reading over my vacation, so bear with me.
Title: Call of the Wild
Author: Jack London
Genre: Fiction--animal-centric pseudo nature documentary? How do you define the genre of someone who invented one?
Synopsis: Buck, a tough but noble mutt of a dog, is stolen from his owner in San Francisco to be sold as a sled dog in an Alaska in the midst of a gold rush. He learns the harshness and brutality of life in the far north, and becomes brutal himself in order to survive.
Thoughts: I never read this before, and man, I'm glad I didn't. I could not have taken this as a kid. Now I can see that what Jack London is doing is showing that life in the face of the elements allows for no gentle sensibilities, only survival. The story is one about the amorality of the quest for survival--beyond the initial theft of Buck, it's never about morals. Only about those that have what it takes to do anything to survive, and those that don't. But given the cruelty shown to Buck and the other sled dogs, and that every character in the book, man or dog, except for Buck, dies, I would not have liked it when I was younger.
It's easy to see why London was immensely popular. In an era before nature documentaries, he was a nature documentary. He gives a portrait of this exotic landscape with his compelling, brutal prose. But it's also very evident that he only spent one winter there (which he did). He is trying to portray animals as naturally as possible, but he is more influenced by Darwinian ideas (manifesting as a kind of race memory) than by actual observations. Makes me want to reread Farley Mowat's Never Cry Wolf (which is fantastic, by the way) to get a better idea of how wolves actually act.
I don't know how you judge a work like this one. I didn't particularly enjoy it, but I can see that it is a masterpiece.
After finishing Call of the Wild (which is awfully short), I started White Fang. The first thirty pages of that are very similar to his short story "To Light a Fire," and can really stand alone. After that, it's kind of nature documentary, but without a deep grounding in actual observation. After a while, I realized it was pretty much Call of the Wild, slightly expanded, and stopped reading. Maybe I'll get back to it eventually, but I think I need a break from London's depressing, brutal view of the world.
Title: Call of the Wild
Author: Jack London
Genre: Fiction--animal-centric pseudo nature documentary? How do you define the genre of someone who invented one?
Synopsis: Buck, a tough but noble mutt of a dog, is stolen from his owner in San Francisco to be sold as a sled dog in an Alaska in the midst of a gold rush. He learns the harshness and brutality of life in the far north, and becomes brutal himself in order to survive.
Thoughts: I never read this before, and man, I'm glad I didn't. I could not have taken this as a kid. Now I can see that what Jack London is doing is showing that life in the face of the elements allows for no gentle sensibilities, only survival. The story is one about the amorality of the quest for survival--beyond the initial theft of Buck, it's never about morals. Only about those that have what it takes to do anything to survive, and those that don't. But given the cruelty shown to Buck and the other sled dogs, and that every character in the book, man or dog, except for Buck, dies, I would not have liked it when I was younger.
It's easy to see why London was immensely popular. In an era before nature documentaries, he was a nature documentary. He gives a portrait of this exotic landscape with his compelling, brutal prose. But it's also very evident that he only spent one winter there (which he did). He is trying to portray animals as naturally as possible, but he is more influenced by Darwinian ideas (manifesting as a kind of race memory) than by actual observations. Makes me want to reread Farley Mowat's Never Cry Wolf (which is fantastic, by the way) to get a better idea of how wolves actually act.
I don't know how you judge a work like this one. I didn't particularly enjoy it, but I can see that it is a masterpiece.
After finishing Call of the Wild (which is awfully short), I started White Fang. The first thirty pages of that are very similar to his short story "To Light a Fire," and can really stand alone. After that, it's kind of nature documentary, but without a deep grounding in actual observation. After a while, I realized it was pretty much Call of the Wild, slightly expanded, and stopped reading. Maybe I'll get back to it eventually, but I think I need a break from London's depressing, brutal view of the world.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2011-08-15 02:57 am (UTC)I remember finding the manliness-is-so-manly stuff pretty compelling when I was 12, but the nature documentary aspect was dead boring. I have no idea how that would translate to me as a reader now.