The Call of the Wild - Jack London

What exactly is The Call of the Wild? Well, for a start it's not a novel. It's a novella, barely half the length of a full-length novel. Is it a book for a children like, say, Black Beauty? I don't believe so. The wild element is just too gruesome. Like Black Beauty, though, it is anthropomorphic - our protagonist is the dog Buck, who reacts to things as we think a dog might. That said, London goes much further than Sewell and Kipling. His dog hero is also aware of his ancient bloodline, all the way back to a common ancestor with the wolves and back to the first co-operation with man - startlingly, a sub-human primitive, probably a Neanderthal.


Then there is the actual call. To start off with Buck is a family pet in the Southland. Then he is stolen and sold because the Klondike Gold Rush at its frenzied height and there is serious money to be had for a dog as big and strong and buck. He is brutally broken by a man in a red shirt. Once above the snowline, it is the other sled dogs who teach him his craft. They too have personalities - the evil Spitz, lazy Pike, and so on. There comes a time when Buck knows it is kill or be killed with Spitz, so they fight a bloody battle and Buck becomes lead dog. He is sold on again and ends up with an ill-fated threesome who have no idea what they are doing. Fortune takes him into the camp of John Thornton, the perfect owner. Yet Buck cannot settle. He literally hears the call of the wild - a wolf howling at the moon - and before long he is the leader of the wolf pack, totally at home in the ancestral life of a wild dog.


I really loved The Call of the Wild. Handily this Vintage edition comes with White Fang, so I'll be onto that within a week or so. If it is half as good as The Call of the Wild it will be very good indeed.

In Dubious Battle - John Steinbeck

In Dubious Battle is Steinbeck's unabashed socialist novel.  Written in 1936 at the height of the Depression but before The Grapes of Wrath it deals, in a sense, with what the Joad family were heading out to California to do - find work picking fruit.

Jim Nolan has had enough.  He has seen his father beaten and humiliated for trying to stand up for the working man's rights.  His father stood alone - that was his mistake - so son Jim decides to join the Party.  There is little doubt that Steinbeck means the Communist Party.  The Party locally is run by Mac and soon Mac takes Jim down to Torgas Valley to try and organise an apple-pickers' strike.

Fruit picking is the only work available.  Families travel miles in clapped out jalopies or, like Mac and Jim, by hopping on freight trains.  Because it is a hirer's market, and because they know the labourers have spent their last dime just to get to Torgas, the owners slash wages the instant the men arrive.  What are they going to do about it?  Nothing - until Mac plants the idea of striking in their minds.  After all, the fruit has to be picked right now, or the growers lose their profits.

Thus begins the labour war.  Mac is a professional; people suspect his motives.  But Jim is open and honest and becomes something of an icon.  The outcome, inevitably, is violent and tragic.

It's amazing that In Dubious Battle isn't better known.  Surely it can only be because of its politics.  There is no doubt whatever that Steinbeck is with the strikers.  It can be said that he knows their efforts are doomed but nevertheless he is in awe of their willingness to fight.  The characters - almost all men - are varied, vibrant and vividly drawn; not just Jim and Mac but London (a reference, surely, to that other literary socialist Jack London), the bear of a man they persuade to lead the strike; old Joy, an echo of Jim's father, who hops a freight down to Torgas just to betray the scabs; the Andersons, father and son, who pay a terribly price for supporting the strikers; the ambivalent Doc Burton, who voices what seems to be Steinbeck's feelings; old Dan, who used to be a daredevil tree-feller; and even Burke, who may or may not be the bosses' plant.

No mere polemic, the book is crammed with plot and twists and surprises.  I for one did not expect the ending.  To put it plainly, I adored In Dubious Battle and cannot recommend it highly enough.

The Road to Wigan Pier - George Orwell

Supposed classic - massive disappointment.  The first half seems acceptable - things that Orwell witnessed personally, statistics he collected - but then you realise: he's looking at the lower working class like a lab assistant watching bacteria through a microscope.  He has no emotional engagement whatsoever.  Worse, he fails to recognise or probe the emotional engagement they have with one another.  Orwell describes the squalor in which they live and sleep but never seems to register that the working people, and even the unemployed, bear the squalor by being out of the house as much as possible.  I knew these people - not at the time, of course, but in their 50s and 60s.  They were my family.  They came from the slums of Sheffield, which Orwell regards as a face unfit for human habitation.  My great-uncle who, to me as a child, was the greatest man alive, lived in a back-to-back with communal toilet block in the yard and a pigeon loft above the lavvy.  These people lived out of the home.  The women chatted on their doorsteps.  They went to the cinema, to social clubs (never pubs for my relatives, many of whom worked for breweries).  Other families lived their lives around church and chapel.  Spiritualism was popular, as was night school.  Many were actively involved in politics, others trades unionists and communists.  All of this passed Orwell by.

The second half was recognised at the time as awful - the publisher, Victor Gollancz, felt obliged to publish an apology for it in the first edition (omitted in this Penguin edition).  The second half is the story of Orwell's journey from middle class public schoolboy, via Burma, to ineffective, vaguely socialist, social critic.  I read it with mounting disgust.  But I did read it, all the way to the end, so it must have some literary quality.  I was planning on getting Homage to Catalonia, or Down and Out in London and Paris, but I think I'd rather try Jack London instead.

The good news - it hasn't put me off Orwell's fiction.