Brunch Book Review: The Call of the Wild, by Jack London

A Brunch Book Review: “The Call of the Wild” by Jack London
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Brunch Book Review: The Call of the Wild by Jack London

I owe a lot to the previews for the new big screen adaptation of Jack London’s The Call of the Wild. The movie looked interesting to me, both Harrison Ford and the CGI enhanced dog looked adorable in all the right ways. The film didn’t look too maudlin, always a plus as far as I am concerned. After a few trailers for the film I was committed to seeing it. However, I also decided I needed to read the book, a classic of modern literature, before seeing the movie. I could not remember if I had ever read it. I thought that it might have been some required reading in high school. If I had read it, I could remember not a single detail. Thus, was a reading project born. 

Jack London didn’t have to work very hard to please me. I am exactly the target audience for wilderness adventures set in the Northwest Territories, or Alaska, of adventurers, dog sleds and abundant wildlands. One of my favorite books ever, is A Naturalist in Alaska, by Adolph Murie (which probably deserves its own review). That book is about one of the great 20^th Century wildlife biologists and his studies in Alaska. So, London was, as the saying goes, pushing at an open door. 

The Call of the Wild is an adventure told from the point of view of a big dog named Buck. This is not an anthropomorphized animal adventure in which all the animals are given human voices, human inclinations, and are generally just humans in animal guises. That can work, as host of animated films, books and even comic book demonstrate. That is not how London approaches the adventures and trials of Buck the dog. London tries to get in the canine head of his appealing hero and explain Buck’s life through a lens filtered deeply by the genus Canis. Specifically, London’s pays a great deal of narrative attention to the things that would, and clearly do, matter to domesticated dogs. Buck’s world is chiefly focused on understanding and predicting human behavior, as well as the dominance hierarchies that drive all dog life.  Both of these behavioral drivers become all important when Buck is conscripted into the life of a sled dog. There is a third thread to London’s narrative, and it may the most tantalizing part of the book. That thread is the meditations the narrator has about the very nature of a dog’s behavioral and mental life. These meditations form the core of London’s call of the wild, which is a tug I suspect London thought many domesticated beings felt. 

Buck represents a dog who, perhaps like many dogs, really feels his wolfish origins deep in his sturdy frame. The further and longer Buck is kept in wildlands and left by the dog handlers to manage his own safety among the other sled dogs the more he seems hear an ancient part of his nature. He is, after all, behaving quite wolfish so how could the ancient rhythms encoded in his genes not help but be awakened? Buck seems to feel this call more than his pack mates. Most of them are actually sled dog breeds and seem born to life in the sled harness. They live to pull and will try to do so even when injured or too old to manage. The sled dog is as neurotic and obsessive in its way as is the herding dog, that lacking cattle or sheep to herd, will try to keep its family in a tight group on a walk or a hike through the woods. Buck is not a purebred dog. He is the product of a mixed breed pairing. Like many mutts, Buck has benefitted by having a robust phenotype, without showing many of the problems of dogs that are the product of long lineages characterized by excessive in-breeding. Buck demonstrates none of the neuroses of his sled dog fellows. He is huge, fast and smart. And while we never hear a direct anthropomorphized word from him, he is an interesting and engaging hero.

I don’t really want to overly summarize the novel. Better for Buck’s adventures to be a surprise revealed by turning pages and reading. Buck meets a lot of people and critters. Most of them are nice, or at least not mean. A few are the opposite, and some are plain bad. London also seems to know the culture of sled dogging of the time. Most of the sled pilots aren’t mean to the animals. Many even show clear affection for the dogs. The men aren’t engaged in sport though, and sled driving is a life of serious and often dangerous work. How accurate London’s portrayal of this life and its insular culture are is a mystery to me. Whether London is accurate or exercising creative license, his writing is so strong the description of life in the snow and ice feels more than accurate. 

I want to point out London’s attempt to grapple with natural history, and, whether he knew it or not, evolutionary history. 

London, like any author of popular fiction, wants to tell a rousing and engaging tale, but at times his narrator’s voice seems almost preoccupied with deep questions about animal lives. Buck is the lever London uses to pontificate about natural history. And Buck is a fine lever indeed. Like all domesticated dogs Buck straddles two behavioral worlds. As a mutt, he doesn’t’ necessarily share the neuroses of working dog breeds. His considerable intellect doesn’t obsess over a job like the minds of many working breeds seem to. He works so hard in the sled, because he enjoys the praise of the humans. Buck works hard to be dominant with other dogs too, and one suspects he does this for the canine accolades his pack mates give him for such efforts. London suspects that the dogs suffer different mental constraints, based on their history of breeding. The sled dogs hear the call only as it extends to the maintaining and governance of canine dominance hierarchies, which is to say a pack order. The sled dog team certainly needs a leader to guide it, but beyond that, the hierarchy serves no real purpose in the dogs lives anymore. For Buck it means more, because he isn’t shackled to or overly possessed by the singular purpose of pulling a sled. Buck seems as if he could take or leave the sled. This is not the case of every dog in his orbit. Buck’s instincts are different than the instincts of his sled dog pack mates. The only clear signals of Buck’s domestication are his fondness for, and comfort around humans. But he was, from the first moment we meet him, a dog with a strong wanderlust. This trait only grows more and more powerful in Buck as gets farther and farther from civilization. 

As an adventure novel, The Call of the Wild certainly works. It hits all the beats an adventure novel should. An added bonus? There is no badly written romance. But I think it really shines when London is contemplating the strange evolutionary history of dogs in a serious way. London seems to understand dogs, and the effects a history specific breeding may have on a dog’s mind. His observations may not actually be correct, but they are plausible ideas when set against the evolutionary history of Canis lupus domesticus. The language is not the language of an evolutionary biologist but that of a person who knows quite a bit about nature, and dogs, and who seems to love them both. That said, the book is a product of its time. There is a black dog named Nig, for instance. But the casual racism that characterized the times is not as bad as it is in other novels of the same period. This is a classic you should visit, or revisit. 

10/10.