The Call of the Wild: Rating: 2 stars

A dog’s journey from pampered pet to nature-hardened beast.

The Call of the Wild (Jack London)
Written by Jack London
Fiction · Adventure
Reviewed November 29, 2008

I have some vague memory of reading this book before, but maybe I’m thinking of White Fang instead; whichever one I read, it didn’t make much of an impression then, and this book hasn’t made one now. It works well enough as an adventure story, but London stops the action far too often to explain the primitive philosophy of the wild — “the law of club and fang” — which comes across as pedantic and dull. London gets too caught up in his praise of the primitive, leading me to wonder with amusement what kind of dog owner he must have been; I can picture him letting his dogs off the leash and waving his arms at them, yelling, “Go! Be free! Follow your wild, wild hearts!” and his dogs looking at him, thinking, …the hell? Who wants to live out there in the cold?

Maybe this kind of book goes over better with kids, or maybe it went over better in a different era. It wasn’t bad, but it felt like a slow read. I have a hunch I’m going to forget this book pretty quickly… just as I did before, perhaps?