Review: White Fang

White Fang by Jack London
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read this as a kid, perhaps as part of the last generation of American kids who’d be expected to grow up with this and Call of the Wild. I remember liking it, but I remember also feeling early on that I’d moved beyond it. I don’t actually remember the experience of reading it, but I can still see the cover of the edition that sat on my shelf for years afterward.

In any case, I’ve had my current “edition” (audio) on my shelf for a long time, and it was only the last day or two when it finally ‘called’ to me. I told myself it had better grab me right away, or I was out. Yes, I was in the mood for some classics, but I wasn’t in the mood for anything that felt dated.

The first parts of this, really the first three-quarters of it, are flat-out amazing. The opening scene may echo some of the Victorian-era establish-character-through-description-of-place move, but I don’t know of anyone outside of Thomas Hardy who does it better than London does it here. We begin with a view of late 19th century Alaska, where, in the stunning cold, anything that lives is “defiant.”

The opening section also pursues a clever strategy. Rather than introducing us immediately to our protagonist – the part dog/mostly wolf White Fang – it lets us see the wilderness through the eyes of a pair of iron haulers who find themselves outsmarts by the dog who will become White Fang’s mother. It’s a beautiful and harrowing sequence, and London masterfully calls on us to sympathize with the perspective of ‘the wild’ over the perspective of the human.

The succeeding sections are equally wonderful as we come to see the world through the eyes of the puppy and then eventually full-grown White Fang. London shows further skill in the way he subtly builds a vocabulary of experience for the young dog, growing the language he has for describing the world we know as White Fang comes to know it.

The ultimate challenge here, though, comes in constructing a narrative around that sensibility. The first half of this flew by for me as London uncovered his basic perspective, but then came “the story” that he set out to tell. I’m OK with the way [SPOILER] White Fang begins to be domesticated by a Native owner, but things get less and less interesting as the “white gods” take over.

I’m troubled by the way the second owner, Beauty Smith, tricks Grey Eagle into selling White Fang by plying him with enough liquor to make him into an alcoholic. (I’m troubled as well by how much the novel privileges the “great White” culture of the white men the Natives do meet.) And, while the final compelling scenes of the novel come when Smith forces White Fang into dog fights, things already seem contrived.

And then, the novel becomes almost disappointing in the way the final owner, a white engineer who – after the “lowly” Native and the “little better” Smith – represents the best of humanity. White Fang in San Francisco – or at least in the American Northwest – seems like a silly 1970s sequel, a kind of Bad News Bears Go to China phenomenon. He’s a creature of the wild, and it’s asking too much of him to become a character in the not-so-interesting life of a California judge and his family. (In fact, the introduction of a final antagonist in the last chapter is so clumsy as to be laughable.)

I don’t come to London for scenes of American society, though. It’s easy to forget that London was as well known for his socialism and labor activism as for his fiction. What we remember collectively about him, though, is precisely what shines through in the first half of this. Maybe some others could do as masterful a job of capturing the hostile wilderness of 130 years ago, but no one else was there as he was, and no one else so skillfully mourned the passing of that world even as he was in the midst of it.


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