December Book Recommendation

Here's your book recommendation for December: The Sea Wolf by Jack London. I discovered White Fang and Call of the Wild in high school and loved those stories, but this is my first time reading The Sea Wolf.

London tells the story of a delicate man of letters, Humphrey Van Weyden, who finds himself victim of a shipwreck in the thick fog of the San Francisco bay. Lost briefly in the chilly bay waters, he is picked up by The Ghost, a seal-hunting schooner headed for the Arctic to catch the winter herd, a ship captained by the legendary brute Wolf Larsen.

Van Weyden is pressed into involuntary service on this ship, and Jack London uses this setup to test the mettle of intellectual idealism and modern ethics in the fires of cruelty and brute survival. To put it another way, London pushes an educated man off the ladder of Maslow's hierarchy to see what happens when he hits the bottom. It is a great story, and poses some very interesting questions in that juxtaposition. Do ethics, nobility, or character have any place on the battlefield, be it of wills or arms? Are ethics and "good works" a luxury of the civilized?

One of the most intriguing arguments is posed by Captain Wolf Larsen himself: that life is cheap, that it does NOT have value, for the very reason that it is so indomitable, so relentlessly prolific, because it never stops pulsing or producing more of itself. And so, he asks, how can something in such unending supply have any lasting value, beyond what, in ridiculous overestimation, the individual puts upon himself?

Perhaps the story does not so much raise the juxtaposition of ethics in a brutal environment, as it does simply provide an exceptionally vivid (if fictional) example of Maslow's hierarchy of needs as they might appear in "real life". Ethics evolve as the environment civilizes, one might argue.

The book is also instructive for me as an author, having just finished writing Asteroid Burn. London also tells his story in the first person, through the eyes of the protagonist, and it is interesting to see what he does with it; to observe the liberties he takes with the perspective that I never saw, or thought were too much of a stretch to be credible. For example, London is not textbook-rigid in the first-person perspective; his character recounts details and nuances of observation that would probably exceed the bounds of the average observer, and yet it works perfectly; it draws me even further into his story, and is not so glaring as to break my suspension of disbelief. As a writer, I'm tempted to break down The Sea Wolf scene by scene, to understand how London put it together, how the pacing works, and what might happen to the story if scenes were rearranged. I'm sure it would teach me a lot about the art of plot, suspense, and pace.

But for you, dear reader, I merely suggest that you get your hands on a copy of The Sea Wolf, curl up beside the nearest fireplace or espresso machine, and join this civilized, soft-skinned gentleman Humphrey Van Weyden as he finds himself stranded upon this tiny mote sailing across the rough and unforgiving seas, a mote populated by brutes, cutthroats and cheats...and of course, one hopelessly beautiful woman.