After an appropriately confusing vote last week, we’re continuing the spirit of 2016 for this month’s Jack London reading group by fudging things. We’re going to read three books, in the following order: The Call of the Wild, White Fang and The Iron Heel. That might seem like a lot, but The Call of the Wild and White Fang are both admirably short, arguably novellas rather than novels, while The Iron Heel is only slightly longer.
It wasn’t just the confusion of the vote that fitted our unsettling times. As I write this, I don’t know who will replace Barack Obama as US president. But, however the result goes, this has been a uniquely unsettling and frightening year for the world’s biggest democracy, so it feels fitting that The Iron Heel, London’s book about the collapse of US democracy and brutal rule by a thuggish elite, emerged as the first popular choice in our vote.
Orwell called The Iron Heel a “remarkable prophecy of the rise of fascism”. It provides a dystopian vision of the US in which the middle class are squeezed out of existence, farmers reduced to serfdom and a few oligarchs control nearly all the wealth, not to mention a private army of mercenaries, and rule – as the title suggests – by stomping on the face of all who oppose them. It sounds uncomfortably like your average liberal’s worst fears, and I hardly dare read it until the nightmare of this US election is finally over.
There are more reasons for leaving extra time before embarking on The Iron Heel: it appears to be out of print in the UK (although freely available online, because it’s out of copyright), so this should provide a bit of time to hunt down copies. Last week I mooted the idea that we should run a Jack London double-header, since many of his books are so short and since his output was so varied and fascinating. This was a popular idea, and dozens of votes were cast for other books. Several ran The Iron Heel a close second.
But there was also strong support for taking London’s two classic canines-in-the-Yukon books, White Fang and The Call of the Wild, together, forming, as participants neatly labelled it, a doggy diptych. This joint ticket proceeded to come in joint second along with The People of the Abyss – until reading group stalwart Natasha Fatale leaped in at just the right moment with a casting vote. So I propose that we read The Call of the Wild and White Fang first, discuss those two next week, and then come to Heel towards the end of the month, once we’re all feeling a bit calmer. Or entirely terrified.
That’s not to say we’ll escape politics entirely as we read White Fang and The Call of the Wild, which are not just stories about dogs. White Fang, for instance – try not to be alarmed – was partly inspired by Nietzche’s ideas about the superman. The books can also be seen as allegories for London’s own wild life and his journey from outcast hobo to prosperous writer. As stories about human injustice and the shape of society, they may be as sharp toothed in their politics as the Iron Heel.
That said, the main things I remember from my own childhood reading is the evocative descriptions of the Yukon and the great northern emptinesses, particularly superb passages such as the famous opening 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.
Yes, please. As soon as I’ve finished writing this, I’m going to put the kettle on, put some logs on the fire and break out for the wilderness. Who knows, maybe I’ll learn some survival skills that will help over the next few days.
