Jack London: The Assassination Bureau, Ltd (1963)

Completed by: Robert L. Fish
Edition: Penguin, 1995
Review number: 1058

This strange novel, left uncompleted by London in 1910, was finally published just after the assassination of J.F. Kennedy, guaranteeing that it would be a sensation of its time. It is a strange, unconvincing novel which mirrors London's concerns about law, morality and violence - particularly the idea of a society which countenances violence against itself.

The Assassination Bureau undertakes murder for payment, of men that its members are convinced are not worthy of life (the corrupt are the main examples given). When the head of the bureau, Ivan Dragomiroff, is approached by a young man and asked to take out a contract on himself, he refuses, but is eventually convinced that the work of the bureau is morally wrong and that therefore by his own rules he deserves to die. A bizarre chase across America follows, as he becomes a fugitive from his own employees (while, because of his own strict morality, continuing to allow the bureau access to its money for the expenses concerned with his own murder).

The difficulty in the novel is in believing in Dragomiroff's changing his mind, and the remorselessness with which he sticks to this decision in the face of the threat to his life. His incomprehensible character makes the rest of the novel seem arbitrary as well, and London is not a good enough writer to pick up the reader's interest in other ways. Interesting, but in the end disappointing.

Jack London: Call of the Wild (1900)

Edition: Award Books
Review number: 939

Jack London wrote a fairly wide variety of fiction, including some early science fiction, but he is overwhelmingly best remembered for this story of dogs in the Alaskan gold rush. Buck, a St Bernard/German Shephard cross, is kidnapped from his owner in California to help fill the massive demand for sled dogs in the far north. Told from his point of view, but with a third person narrator, Call of the Wild describes how he is broken in to this work and eventually becomes successful before feeling the call to move into the wilderness.

The obvious influences on The Call of the Wild are the animal stories of Rudyard Kipling, particularly The White Seal. The Call of the Wild has a similar tone, and uses anthropomorphism of a similar kind - not patronising or prettifying, but trying to give the reader an insight. It is more savage than Kipling, and has something of the American cult of the wilderness, particularly towards the end, an aspect which is unsurprisingly absent from the English writer's work.

It remains an exciting novel, and makes me wonder, reading it again, whether London's other writing will have survived as well as this has.