The Call Of The Wild/White Fang (2006) - Plot & Excerpts
Jack LondonWhite FangThe Call of the WildPenguin Popular Classics, Paperback, [1994]. 12mo. 278 pp.The Call of the Wild serialized in Saturday Evening Post, June 12 – July 18, 1903.The Call of the Wild first published in book form by Macmillan, August 1903.White Fang serialized in Outing, May–Oct 1906White Fang first published in book form by Macmillan, 1906.Penguin Popular Classics, 1994.ContentsWhite FangChapter 1: The Trail of the MeatChapter 2: The She-WolfChapter 3: The Hunger CryChapter 4: The Battle of the FangsChapter 5: The LairChapter 6: The Gray CubChapter 7: The Wall of the WorldChapter 8: The Law of MeatChapter 9: The Makers of FireChapter 10: The BondageChapter 11: The OutcastChapter 12: The Trail of the GodsChapter 13: The CovenantChapter 14: The FamineChapter 15: The Enemy of His KindChapter 16: The Mad GodChapter 17: The Reign of HateChapter 18: The Clinging DeathChapter 19: The IndomitableChapter 20: The Love-MasterChapter 21: The Long TrailChapter 22: The SouthlandChapter 23: The God's DomainChapter 24: The Call of KindChapter 25: The Sleeping WolftThe Call of the WildChapter 1: Into the PrimitiveChapter 2: The Law of Club and FangChapter 3: The Dominant Primordial BeastChapter 4: Who Has Won to MastershipChapter 5: The Toil of Trace and TrailChapter 6: For the Love of a ManChapter 7: The Sounding of the Call===============================================Few works are better suited for an omnibus edition than White Fang and The Call of the Wild. Only the titles don’t fit too well. They should have been White Fang and Buck or The Call of the Wild and The Lure of Civilization. Never mind. Classic canine stories, variations on opposite themes and perfect companion pieces, both are beautifully written inquiries into animal and human nature. The only fault of this edition, apart from being a little too closely printed, is the chronologically incorrect order. But, for once, Penguin did a great job with the cover. The bleak landscape perfectly evokes the “the savage, frozen-hearted Northland Wild” which Jack London admires tremendously. See the beginning of White Fang:Dark spruce forest frowned on either side the frozen waterway. The trees had been stripped by a recent wind of their white covering of frost, and they seemed to lean towards each other, black and ominous, in the fading light. A vast silence reigned over the land. The land itself was a desolation, lifeless, without movement, so lone and cold that the spirit of it was not even that of sadness. There was a hint in it of laughter, but of a laughter more terrible than any sadness – a laughter that was mirthless as the smile of the sphinx, a laughter cold as the frost and partaking of the grimness of infallibility. It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life. It was the Wild, the savage, frozen-hearted Northland Wild.[…]It is not the way of the Wild to like movement. Life is an offence to it, for life is movement; and the Wild aims always to destroy movement. It freezes the water to prevent it running to the sea; it drives the sap out of the trees till they are frozen to their mighty hearts; and most ferociously and terribly of all does the Wild harry and crush into submission man – man who is the most restless of life, ever in revolt against the dictum that all movement must in the end come to the cessation of movement.Beautiful writing, isn’t it? There is a hint of florid verbosity, a tad repetitious perhaps, but the grand rhetorical sweep is undeniably effective. Such passages are exceptional, though. For the most part London’s incredibly descriptive prose serves the situation and the characters; he is seldom given to metaphysical speculation. Occasional clumsiness (“upon which impeachment of what to her was her most essential sex prerogative”) is counterbalanced by frequent poetic flights (“buds bursting the shackles of the frost”, “the sun’s futile effort to appear”). The pace is slow but inexorable; the atmosphere is enthralling and visceral; the enormous amount of detail, rather than puts you out, draws you in with a vengeance. Many scenes I find almost painfully vivid. To take but a single example from both works, the first three chapters of White Fang are one of the scariest short stories I have ever read, while Buck’s hunting down a wounded moose in the last chapter of The Call of the Wild is one of the most heart-rending. In short, evocative storytelling doesn’t get much better than Jack London’s most famous canine stories.It is refreshing now and then to read a work of fiction in which humans are firmly in the background. So they are here. Too much has been made of Jack London’s anthropomorphic proclivities. Seldom does he indulge excessively in them, mostly (though not only) in White Fang which is more than twice longer and correspondingly more ambitious, but less successful, than its companion. When he makes White Fang immediately recognise humans as masters of the world or Buck dream of hairy ape-men, Mr London endows his characters with knowledge and reasoning they have no right to possess. On the whole, however, he is remarkably successful in creating protagonists who are not humans at all. Buck and White Fang are not troubled by unpleasant memories (most people are) and learn from their mistakes (most people don’t). They don’t talk human languages, nor do they think long and hard over their actions. They are perfect incarnations of the Wild (his capital), unsoiled by human fairy tales like morality. Pity, compassion, kindness, empathy are quite foreign to them. They know only the most primordial of all instincts: food, breed, love, hate, pleasure, pain, fear, even death (= cessation of movement). Those who read Jack London only to search for his socialism, social Darwinism, alcoholism or other “-isms” would be disappointed with these works – or would they? The novels are more complex and ambiguous than they look; I guess they can be used to support plenty of contradictory arguments. The only attitude I, personally, am able to detect with certainty is profound admiration for the Beauty of Nature (my capitals, but I think the author would have agreed). This is no mean achievement. An intellectual giant like Bertrand Russell, who achieved so much in his long life, could never achieve that. He was appalled that animals kill each other and there is no end of this suffering. But this, of course, is a myopic point of view. Once the big picture is grasped, at least to some extent, there is a kind of beauty in the exquisite balance between predator and prey; cold and harsh beauty, to be sure, but beauty nonetheless. Jack London knew that very well indeed. It is not just physical fitness and brute force that he admires, though sometimes he waxes disconcertingly lyrical about them. Cunning is highly praised, too, and often developed to something very much like intelligence, or at least shrewdness. Above all, intense and self-sufficient existence in perfect harmony with the environment, making the best of all your natural gifts, is what the author admires most. This is what Buck achieved in the end and White Fang lost long before that. This is something we, humans, have not enjoyed ever since our apelike ancestors and are currently getting further and further from.Speaking specifically of humans, it must be said that the novels are not misanthropic. This is no small achievement, either. It must be tempting, when nearly all of your characters are animals, to turn the humans into cruel monsters or cartoonish caricatures. This is not the case here. Sometimes humans are mean bullies (Beauty Smith) or stupid greenhorns (the hilarious episode with Hal, Charles and Mercedes), but for the most part they are kind-hearted professionals (Perrault, Francois) or at least neutral (Bill, Henry). Then there are John Thornton and Weedon Scott. It is significant that in both novels (yet another reason to read them together) deep compassion, for better or worse purely human quality unknown in the Wild, plays pivotal role. Buck would most probably have succumbed to “the call of the wild” even without John Thornton’s help, but the latter was more than mere last link. As for White Fang, it is up to the reader to decide whether he fulfilled himself completely or paid too high a price for his freedom. In short, the human element is rather prominent and worth considering, but it must be searched, not in the animals as so many misguided fellows do, but in the bipedal characters. The graphic representation of violence in both novels has drawn some negative criticism from uncomprehending folk. Certainly, there is a good deal of violence, and some of it is hard to stomach. Dogs are beaten with clubs and whips or torn to pieces; game is stalked, hunted and killed mercilessly; humans, so far as they appear, don’t fare much better. Death is constantly present and always violent, sometimes gruesome. Put like that it sounds pretty horrible. Well, the violence is less in amount and intensity than in The Passion of the Christ (2004), but it shares the same general characteristics: extreme but not excessive. It is never – I repeat: never – gratuitous. All of it is relevant to the plot and the characters, for it propels the former and builds the latter, and to sentimentalize it even a little would be to falsify it completely. Besides, to say that violence is the raison d'être of the novels is like saying that Beethoven composed nothing but operas.From reading some reviews one might be led to believe that The Call of the Wild and White Fang are something like The Jungle Books and Animal Farm. Far from it! These are neither fairy tales for children nor political propaganda masquerading as art. This is not a comment against Kipling and Orwell, whose “animal stories” I in fact enjoy, nor does it constitute a judgement that London is better or worse than them. He is simply different. And definitely worth reading, not by children and not in “adapted” editions, but by thinking adults at leisure to savour the rich prose. If you enjoy reading on a computer screen, there are countless online editions. P.S. The first three sentences of the third chapter of The Call of the Wild are used to great comic effect in Bad Boys (1983), an otherwise gritty and violent teenage drama set mostly in a juvenile correctional facility. It remains one of the most underappreciated movies of the 1980s, with a stellar lead performance by then very young and largely unknown Sean Penn. It is both hilarious and saddening to see how the delinquents, when they are asked to read the passage on the blackboard, can’t pass beyond the tricky phrase “dominant primordial”. Later Mick O’Brien, Penn’s character, reads the novel in his cell and sighs disconsolately: “I don’t get this shit!”
I was attracted to this book by the amazing cover illustration by ilovedust. I'd downloaded and read part of White Fang on my phone before buying this physical copy and found it funny and very readable.The Call of the WildI'll have to admit that this was pretty hard to get into and took me ages to finally overcome the inertia and finish the story. I found it difficult to connect with Buck, even though some of the writings were really exceptional. London was able to beautifully illustrate the bleakness of the north and the frailty of the human life and I think that was the redeeming feature of the story.White FangWhite Fang was comparatively a much quicker and easier read and proved a lot more addictive. The story began with two men being confronted by a large pack of hungry wolves and was pretty creepy. London very obviously spent a lot of time in the wild north during the goldrush, because the descriptions of the weather and the surroundings were all very realistic and you could feel how the characters, animal or man alike, felt during those times. I was torn over which group I should support because I love animals, but the wolves were really savage in nature. London put away those worries for us because then, the story changes its direction to focus on the wolf pack. Here you cannot help but hope that the wolves survive and no matter how much I disliked the alpha female of the pack in the beginning, I couldn't help rooting for her in the end. We are introduced to White Fang someway into the story and he was instantly a likable character. The journey of White Fang from the wild into captivity was not a comfortable read, but his unwavering loyalty to his master provided some consolation to that. Taking into account that this story was written over a hundred years ago, some of the measures of animal-training are not considered ethical today. However, one must keep an open mind when reading this beautiful account of a wolf-dog's life. There are events to rejoice over and events to cry out in indignation over, but overall it is a compelling read. The best part? The satisfying ending.
What do You think about The Call Of The Wild/White Fang (2006)?
Are you special? Well of course you are! You are built up from your trials and pain. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Like White Fang, you are here for a purpose. Someday you'll realize what the purpose is.White Fang by Jack London is an amazing story about a half-wolf, half-dog that goes through many struggles and truly learns about himself. He goes on a captivating journey of courage and strength; life. It also follows a team of sled dogs led by a man named Henry. It tells of their journeys and experiences that helps White Fang grow up. Jack London's use of figurative language and amazing imagery make the story seem real. He uses amazing story telling and gives the book a real-life feel. It may be a little hard to grasp at first, but White Fang turns out to be a life-changing book. Jack London wrote this book to teach us a very important moral in life. The theme of this book is quite simple. Through White Fang's struggles, he grew up. We must learn life's rules on our own and learn to take our own responsibility. Though we do have people to help us in life, we also have to pitch in on teaching ourselves. We are in charge of ourselves, our actions and our responsibilities. This book is a great, heartwarming story for both children, young adults and adults. The story is easy to follow, and it has an amazing moral. I recommend this book to anyone that is in for an interesting story of love and rules of life. I hope you enjoy the book!
—Claire Olson
Picked it up when I was on a shopping spree, I knew it was probably about dogs and wolves, but apart from that I didn't knew what to expect.So, I just started reading and let the book surprise me.I started with White Fang which, apart from some focus switches in the beginning, I ended up really liking. It was fast-paced action from the beginning to the end, I just couldn't put the book down. There is a healthy dose of violence, but it's far from over-the-top. Instead, it really adds something to the story.After reading some other random book in between, I read Call of the Wild. It's only about half the length of White Fang, which makes it really short. The same fast-paced action from White Fang continues here.The writing style in both books is pretty straightforward, nothing too complex, which I found good.Overall, I have to admit that I like White Fang better, probably because it's just that little bit longer to add some more depth to the story. It may also be because that's the one I read first, so the writing style in Call of the Wild didn't captivate me any more, it was just the good story and action that kept me going. Both are very good reads though, definately recommending this to anyone.
—Marc
In Jack London’s book “The Call of the Wild,” Buck, the strong half -sheep half St. Bernard dog was secluded to the estate life in sunny California. Although everything was going well for him, he was suddenly kidnapped and shipped to Canada where he would soon be tortured and trained to obey a master.Soon after his arrival in Canada, he began pulling sleds for the profit of his masters. After being influenced by the other dogs’ struggle to survive, his primitive instincts become awakened and he begins to accept his call of the wild—that is being a true leader. In Jack London’s book “The Call of the Wild,” Buck, the strong half -sheep half St. Bernard dog was secluded to the estate life in sunny California. Although everything was going well for him, he was suddenly kidnapped and shipped to Canada where he would soon be tortured and trained to obey a master.Soon after his arrival in Canada, he began pulling sleds for the profit of his masters. After being influenced by the other dogs’ struggle to survive, his primitive instincts become awakened and he begins to accept his call of the wild—that is being a true leader.
—Michael Kaufling
