Author: Jack London
Publisher: Amazon Audio CD (isn't everything?!)
Rating: WARTY!
This audio CD was read appallingly by Frank Muller. Muller begins every sentence in sharp, ringing tones, and then drains away to an incoherent mumble at the end of the sentence. I am not kidding. The novel was bad enough as it was, but Muller's manic reading style rendered it all but unendurable.
This novel does not deserve the reputation it has. So how did it even get that reputation? I have a theory that lousy novels can become 'great' if they meet a need that nothing much more worthy has yet come along to meet. Back in 1903, this need, whatever it was, had not been met, and London was the first writer to even think he could get close, so despite his novel being tedious, unrealistic, and empty, it got its fifteen minutes of fame regardless.
London was known for claiming he wrote this because other writers, in anthropomorphizing animals, had been too sugary. He wanted to write a more realistic one. He failed. His portrayal of the dogs is no different from anyone else's portrayal of dogs or any other animal. He simply turns them into savage humans and that's the extent of his artistry. It would have been just as realistic had he depicted them as chatting to each other as they pulled along the sled.
The main character is Buck, a mix of Saint Bernard and Scotch Collie who is living in California until he's stolen by a guy who evidently has gambling debts. Buck is sold to people who take him to Alaska to be used as a sled dog, because you know those Alaskan sled dog scouts always tour the US during the season, looking for team players amongst doggie athletes. Go Huskies! London inexplicably portrays Buck as turning from a mild-mannered dog (let's call him Bark Kent) into a savage beast in the course of one train trip (let's call him by his alter-ego, Superhound), which then has to be brutally beaten by a man with a club until he turns into mild-mannered Bark Kent again. Really?! I mean seriously, this juvenile portrayal is somehow a classic? London may have lived in Alaska, but he knows nothing about dogs.
Buck ends up in the ownership of a pair of French-Canadian delivery boys and is trained to pull a sled along with a team of huskies and other, mixed-breed, dogs. Buck meets his mortal enemy in the form of Spitz, the team lead dog. Spitz is the Quaritch of the sled-dog world, and has the scars to prove it. After several savage encounters, and more beatings o' the club of course, Buck takes down Spitz, who is set upon by the rest of the pack and killed. Buck thereby maintains his heroic status and becomes pack leader.
After a brutal trip to deliver mail (yes, brutal is the key word here - this novel was probably far more of an inspiration for Divergent than ever The Hunger Games was!), Buck and his team are exhausted, and he's sold off to three clowns who are clueless about traveling in the Great White North. How these people even survived thus far is unexplained. Now London would have us believe that despite the just-completed brutal journey over the bitterly frozen wasteland, it’s suddenly spring and the ice is melting, making travel dangerous! This, he would have us swallow, adequately accounts for how the three clowns all drown when the river ice breaks under their sled, taking the entire dog team with them. Fortunately for Superhound, he's been stolen away from the clowns by an heroic guy who bullies them into giving Buck to him, upon pain of death. That's how nice this guy is.
This savage, wild dog then suddenly becomes mild-mannered Bark Kent again, all fluffy and loving because Thornton (or whatever his name was) saved his life. Honestly? I'm about barfing by this time in the novel, to say nothing of barking mad. But unfortunately, it doesn’t end there - no, London pushes on with dogged determination, no doubt grinning wolfishly. Thornton is slaughtered by the local natives, and Buck goes on a revenge trip, savaging them in return. Really? Finally, he heeds 'the call of the wild' and joins a pack of wolves?
Call of the wild? London would have us think that all dogs are really wolves under a dangerously thin veneer of domestication. Forget ten thousand years of evolution! Deep down these wild beasts have ancestral memory of those early, sylvan times when dogs would skip and play in the sweet outdoors, and they all, to a dog, long to return to the wild. I have two words for london: the first refers to a popular species of the genus Equus, and the second relates to what comes out of its rear-end after a large meal.
If London had written a fictional account of his own interesting adventures in Alaska, that might have been a good novel (assuming it wasn't narrated by Muller), but this novel? This novel is warty!
