I had requested this classic novel for my siblings’ 2018 reading list, but as it turns out, I’m the only rube who hadn’t yet read it. That had to change. So after finishing The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky a few weeks early (interestingly enough, all my siblings quit on that one!), I thought I’d catch up on this tale of nature, which I knew I would enjoy far more. There are some horrible books considered “classics”, but The Call of the Wild deserves every honor its given.
Unless you live under a gold-free rock, you probably already know the rough plot of London’s most famous book, the story of a sled-dog named Buck making a name for himself in the Alaskan frontier. Actually, I don’t live under said-rock, yet until I started reading, I hadn’t been aware that the story is told from Buck’s own perspective, a feat Jack London accomplishes with superb realism. With every bark and every compression of muscle and sinew, London takes his readers to ground level, eye-to-eye with each huskie or mutt that tramps his way into the dogsled harness.
Buck’s adventures start when he’s kidnapped from California by an acquaintance of his owners, and he’s then beaten into submission by the nameless, faceless “man in the red sweater.” Buck learns to live by “the law of club and fang”, and with guarded responsibility adjusts to the rough and exhausting life in the distant Northwest. With enemies both human and canine, Buck learns through grit and cunning that the strong don’t always survive. The smart and strong do.
Late in the story, London takes his readers into Buck’s dream-world, into a distant ancestral memory of bounding through former frontiers with an earlier kind of human. This fantasy is familiar to me, as London made a whole book of it in Before Adam (1906). These dreams ignite in Buck a passion to return to that wild life, and the pulls get stronger as the story progresses. Yet he cannot answer this call of the wild while the love of Buck’s latest master keeps him tied to Alaskan civility. When this master is slaughtered by natives, however, Buck is free to release his inner animal and finally cavort on unstamped earth with the timber wolves of the Alaskan frontier.
I loved every bit of this story—sadly, even the part where the idiots drown—and I’m sure I will read it again one day. I imagine other authors have used London’s knowledge of turn-of-the-century Klondike gold mining to heighten the authenticity of their own writing, like James Michener in Alaska. And that’s just fine. London’s gift to the world was this gritty realism, snapshots of a world long since passed. As tragic of a life he led and ended, it’s important to celebrate the mark he left on both history and literature.
©2018 E.T.
Read More from Jack London:
- The Call of the Wild (1903)
- The Game (1905)
- Before Adam (1906)
- The Road (1907)
- When God Laughs (1911)
- The Human Drift (1917)
- Love of Life and Other Stories (1907)
- The Red One (1918)
- Stories of the North (1965)