The Call of the Wild

⚖The case for it

Buck against Spitz for control of the team is the sequence readers name, the point where a stolen pet stops being anybody’s property. London writes from inside a dog without turning him into a person in a fur coat, and readers say “I don’t think I’ve ever felt so attuned to a dog’s mindset.” John Thornton is the first man to treat Buck as more than equipment, and that chapter is the one people go back to. Under a hundred pages carry the whole Yukon, the cold rendered economically enough that reviewers call it cinematic. “Conan among canines,” one writes, of what a critic called “the sheer surging of life.”

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

A man in a red sweater teaches Buck to submit with a club in an early chapter, and readers who met the book as children still name that scene as the one that marked them. What follows is dogs against dogs and men against dogs throughout, which one reader sums up as “84 pages of torture” and another as “why couldn’t London have tortured oysters or skunks.” The Native tribe arriving late is “a shoehorned plot device” built on ugly cliché. The one significant woman exists to demonstrate incompetence. And the law-of-club-and-fang philosophy reads on an adult reread as moralising about primitivism.

— the honest librarian

3h

honest hours

4

sittings