The Call of the Wild is unlike any other book I’ve read, it doesn’t feel like a novel; but it’s not trying to be one. On the surface it’s an adventure story, and the tale of a dog, Buck, growing into maturity and discovering his wolf-nature. Critics have also called it a fable, a parable and an allegory. When it first came out, a review in The Atlantic Monthly said that it was a book: "untouched by bookishness. . . . The making and the achievement of such a hero constitute, not a pretty story at all, but a very powerful one."
Actually, there is a lot of sublimity in this tale, just not conventional prettiness. Jack London cherishes the nobility he finds in some dogs and men, and admires the spirit in nature, much as Walt Whitman does. But there’s nothing Disneyfied in this world, darkness and brutality are as essential to it as sunshine and love are. Here’s a link to The Call of the Wild, complete with illustrations and pages you can turn.
The Call of the Wild is not an intellectual book, but red blood pumps through its veins. Halfway through, I was surprised to find how much I cared for this huge dog, Buck — how I hurt when he got wounded, then thrilled when he triumphed or found loyal friends. Jack London gets many things right here, but the book’s singular spell works by dropping us precisely into Buck’s furry world, so that we see, hear, smell and taste exactly as he does, and know all he feels in his heart. However, it takes a long voyage and a lot of world-building before we find ourselves fully inhabiting the mind of this dog. London opens The Call of the Wild with third person omniscient narration (sprinkled with a few glimpses of Buck’s dog’s-eye-view), showing us Buck’s comfortable Californian cradle in 1897:
Buck did not read the newspapers, or he would have known that trouble was brewing, not alone for himself, but for every tidewater dog, strong of muscle and with warm, long hair, from Puget Sound to San Diego. Because men, groping in the Arctic darkness, had found a yellow metal, and because steamship and transportation companies were booming the find, thousands of men were rushing into the Northland. These men wanted dogs, and the dogs they wanted were heavy dogs, with strong muscles by which to toil, and furry coats to protect them from the frost.
Buck lived at a big house in the sun-kissed Santa Clara Valley. Judge Miller's place, it was called. It stood back from the road, half-hidden among the trees, through which glimpses could be caught of the wide cool veranda that ran around its four sides. The house was approached by graveled driveways which wound about through wide-spreading lawns and under the interlacing boughs of tall poplars. At the rear things were on even a more spacious scale than at the front. There were great stables, where a dozen grooms and boys held forth, rows of vine-clad servants' cottages, an endless and orderly array of outhouses, long grape arbors, green pastures, orchards, and berry patches. Then there was the pumping plant for the artesian well, and the big cement tank where Judge Miler's boys took their morning plunge and kept cool in the hot afternoon.
And over this great demesne Buck ruled. Here he was born, and here he had lived the four years of his life. . . . His father, Elmo, a huge St. Bernard, had been the Judge's inseparable companion, and Buck bid fair to follow in the way of his father. He was not so large--he weighed only one hundred and forty pounds--for his mother, She, had been a Scotch shepherd dog. Nevertheless, one hundred and forty pounds, to which was added the dignity that comes of good living and universal respect, enabled him to carry himself in right royal fashion. During the four years since his puppyhood he had lived the life of a sated aristocrat; he had a fine pride in himself, was even a trifle egotistical, as country gentlemen sometimes become because of their insular situation. But he had saved himself by not becoming a mere pampered house dog. Hunting and kindred outdoor delights had kept down the fat and hardened his muscles; and to him, as to the cold-tubbing races, the love of water had been a tonic and a health preserver.
London is a first-rate storyteller, and hit his mark here. This book appeared in 1903, since when it’s been translated into 50 languages and published in 1200 editions. London’s pace flows naturally and changes to suit his focus; his humans and dogs are all convincing individuals; he’s especially fine when painting nature and wilderness, and when grabbing our pulse with frequent adventures. London put a lot of heart in this book. He’s poetic on nature, romantic on dogs, and gets mystical when the call of the wild starts singing to Buck’s soul. He also faces ugliness squarely, never flinching from the brutality in man or beast. Tennyson wrote of “Nature, red in tooth and claw”; London’s second chapter is “The Law of Club and Fang.”
I’m now going to spoil The Call of the Wild slightly by discussing its opening plot and guiding theme. But these were already signposted in the title and foreshadowed in the first paragraph. The richness of reading here come from being with Buck through his long journey, and passing through his cumulative changes along the way. In the first pages we meet Buck, an amiable alpha dog, who’s indulged and soft. He’s dognapped, taken north, and put in the hands of meaner men than he’s ever met before, who teach him “once for all, that he stood no chance against a man with a club.” By the time Buck gets to Alaska his world has changed enormously, and he’s beginning to as well. Alaska is not hospitable to a porch dog from California, it demands a fiercer breed.
So Buck has to awaken and manage his inner wolf, who is deep within and takes a lot of struggling and hardening to come to the surface. There’s a book based around a similar dichotomy in a human hero, expressed in a much more sudden and schizophrenic fashion: The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. In that case we root entirely for Dr. Jekyll, and judge Mr. Hyde to be the inferior half of his nature, a lessening of who he is. In Buck’s case his inner dog and wolf are equally natural and true, and the wolf is better suited to the harsh environment and competition of the Klondike Gold Rush. Wolf-Buck is as savage as Dr. Jekyll, but has natural nobility within that, partly because he just has better character, and partly because we expect Victorian doctors to be civilized, while dog-heroes have a simpler morality. Here is Buck accommodating to his harsh new life in Alaska:
He swiftly lost the fastidiousness which had characterized his old life. A dainty eater, he found that his mates, finishing first, robbed him of his unfinished ration. There was no defending it. While he was fighting off two or three, it was disappearing down the throats of the others. To remedy this, he ate as fast as they; and, so greatly did hunger compel him, he was not above taking what did not belong to him. He watched and learned. When he saw Pike, one of the new dogs, a clever malingerer and thief, slyly steal a slice of bacon when Perrault's back was turned, he duplicated the performance the following day, getting away with the whole chunk. A great uproar was raised, but he was unsuspected; while Dub, an awkward blunderer who was always getting caught, was punished for Buck's misdeed.
This first theft marked Buck as fit to survive in the hostile Northland environment. It marked his adaptability, his capacity to adjust himself to changing conditions, the lack of which would have meant swift and terrible death. It marked, further, the decay or going to pieces of his moral nature, a vain thing and a handicap in the ruthless struggle for existence. It was all well enough in the Southland, under the law of love and fellowship, to respect private property and personal feeling; but in the Northland, under the law of club and fang, whoso took such things into account was a fool, and in so far as he observed them he would fail to prosper. . . .
His development (or retrogression) was rapid. His muscles became hard as iron, and he grew callous to all ordinary pain. He achieved an internal as well as external economy. He could eat anything, no matter how loathsome or indigestible; and, once eaten, the juices of his stomach extracted the last least particle of nutriment; and his blood carried it to the farthest reaches of his body, building it into the toughest and stoutest of tissues. Sight and scent became remarkably keen, while his hearing developed such acuteness that in his sleep he heard the faintest sound and knew whether it heralded peace or peril. He learned to bite the ice out with his teeth when it collected between his toes; and when he was thirsty and there was a thick scum of ice over the water hole, he would break it by rearing and striking it with stiff fore legs. His most conspicuous trait was an ability to scent the wind and forecast it a night in advance. No matter how breathless the air when he dug his nest by tree or bank, the wind that later blew inevitably found him to leeward, sheltered and snug.
And not only did he learn by experience, but instincts long dead became alive again. The domesticated generations fell from him. In vague ways he remembered back to the youth of the breed, to the time the wild dogs ranged in packs through the primeval forest and killed their meat as they ran it down.
This path, later in the book, is where London waxes mystical. Buck hears the call of the wild outside, when wolves howl in the distance and the sound stirs his blood. He also hears the call inwardly, growing louder as the beast in him grows ascendant. Buck learns to gaze long into the fire, tracing genetic memories of hunting alongside a short-legged hairy man who “could spring up into the trees and travel ahead as fast as on the ground, swinging by the arms from limb to limb, sometimes a dozen feet apart, letting go and catching, never falling, never missing his grip.”
I got swept up in The Call of the Wild, I enjoyed the journey and all that Buck lived through. I can see three aspects of this book that might bother some readers: the suffering and death along the way, to dogs and some humans we care about; the brutality and even cruelty we see in Wolf-Buck; the mystical elements later in the book, which might feel too fairytale. I noticed all these things, but none of them shocked me out of the story in progress. They felt integral to the world London was painting, which always felt coherent and alive within itself.
I believe that when you read a book, especially a book with a singular flavor and vision animating it, you offer the writer your imagination and thoughts and feelings, you give them your full attention. If the writer knows what they’re doing, and that particular book is for you, they’ll pay you back with interest, and your imagination will be a little larger when you put the book down. If Buck wants to lope through the summer midnight forests of my subconscious for the rest of my days, howling sometimes at my inner moon, he’s always welcome. Now that he’s blazed that trail, he belongs there.