‘Nietzsche was right. I won't take the time to tell you who Nietzsche was, but he was right. The world belongs to the strong - to the strong who are noble as well and who do not wallow in the swine-trough of trade and exchange. The world belongs to the true nobleman, to the great blond beasts, to the non-compromisers, to the “yes-sayers”.’
‘With the aurora borealis flaming coldly overhead, or the stars leaping in the frost dance, and the land numb and frozen under its pall of snow, this song of the huskies might have been the defiance of life, only it was pitched in minor key, with long-drawn wailings and half-sobs, and was more the pleading of life, the articulate travail of existence. It was an old song, old as the breed itself—one of the first songs of the younger world in a day where songs were sad. It was invested with the woe of unnumbered generations, this plaint by which Buck was so strangely stirred. When he moaned and sobbed, it was with the pain of living that was of old the pain of his wild fathers, and the fear and mystery of the cold and dark that was to them fear and mystery. And that he should be stirred by it marked the completeness with which he harked back through the ages of fire and roof to the raw beginnings of life in the howling ages.’
‘There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of the living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive. This ecstasy, this forgetfulness of living, comes to the artist, caught up and out of himself in a sheet of flame; it comes to the soldier, war-mad on a stricken field and refusing quarter; and it came to Buck, leading the pack, sounding the old wolf-cry, straining after the food that was alive and that fled swiftly before him through the moonlight. He was sounding the deeps of his nature, and of the parts of his nature that were deeper than he, going back to the womb of Time. He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in that it was everything that was not death, that it was aglow and rampant, expressing itself in movement, flying exultantly under the stars and over the face of dead matter that did not move.’
Upon wondering how I ought to write about a book of this nature, I obviously went to look at the reviews available on Amazon, Goodreads, and Reddit, to see how those of little concern to the protagonist would react to the brutality and beauty of its worldview. I was not surprised then to discover a mixture of habitual disgust and admiration followed from review to review. The common criticisms reflected what would appear to be an enlightened revulsion of the cruelty of nature, of the Yukon trail, and of the dogs themselves. This was contrasted with words of admiration for the beauty of the prose, which works as a predecessor to Hemingway or McCarthy, in that its sparseness is brief without forsaking the thing any literary style aims for, which is the essence of the thing it claims to be worth writing about. We see in London’s book here a few different themes, styles, and settings, and a wise harmony between these elements, but it is my contention that the truly beautiful parts of the book is Buck’s ascension—not necessarily to the height of the mush team, nor the wolf pack at the end, but to the primordial instincts of the self. This, in the end, is the main concern. It is not, as many presume, a socialist or marxist critique of the conditions of nature, which is the ammunition for a certain kind of leftist to make claims about how one must rise above nature (if such a thing is even possible). What is truly the heart of this novel, the believable one, despite any leftist sympathies of London, estimated from his time in left-leaning clubs, activities in socialist movements, or membership of the Bohemian Grove, is a heraldry or exaltation of nature as itself. What this remarkable work achieves then, in spite of its criticisms or maybe even aims, is an unvarnished catharsis for a certain kind of spirit—the same one, perhaps, as the man who reads this blog.
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