Book Review: White Fang

Today's book review is brought to you by sled-dog types. These dogs are not for everybody, but the people for whom they make great pets probably like the classic novel about one too. At the time of posting the dogs photographed below were in search of homes. In some places they languish in shelters, misunderstood and unwanted; in other places the bidding on them is fast and furious, and their prices may be high. 

Zipcode 10101: Suki in New Jersey 

Despite the girly-sounding name the shelter says the dog is male. Blue eyes are less unusual in Alaskan Malamutes than they are in most dog breeds. He's not blind, has been neutered and vaccinated, and seems to be learning to settle for long brisk walks on a leash while living in the city. His foster humans describe him as "such a puppy"--in a nice way. To meet him, click https://www.petfinder.com/dog/suki-55260254/nj/boonton/gimmesheltersorg-nj713/ .

Zipcode 20202: Raya from Gettysburg 

Where she found snow to crunch through. Raya is described as eight years old, which is pretty "senior"  for a big dog, but as still having "lots of love left to give." She seems to have arthritis and needs a ramp to get in and out of cars. She still likes walks. The shelter staff recommend her to households without other dogs or children. The adoption fee is low. To meet her, visit https://www.petfinder.com/dog/raya-54182839/pa/gettysburg/chesapeake-area-alaskan-malamute-protection-va127/ .

Zipcode 30303: Razzmatazz in Dawsonville 

Everyone knows sled dogs are on the large side, but most of their Petfinder pages seem to evade the question of just how large. Razzmatazz has been weighed at 53 pounds. They're strong for their size, so if you can't hold and carry 50 to 75 pounds of energy, you should enjoy these pictures and then adopt a smaller dog. 

Known to be six years old, Razzmatazz is described as quiet, friendly, good with other animals and children, and already on the "older" side in his size category. To meet him in real life, visit https://www.petfinder.com/dog/razzmatazz-55256459/ga/dawsonville/dawson-county-humane-society-ga433/ .

Now, about the book...

Title: White Fang

Author: Jack London

Date: 1906

Publisher: (centennial edition) Simon & Schuster

ISBN: 978-1-4169-1414-3

Length: 343 pages

Quote: “Out of his puniness and fright he challenged and menaced the whole wide world.”

Despite the closeness our parents fostered, my brother and I didn’t always agree. He loved Jack London’s dog stories. I didn’t. I had to go back and reread this one, fifty years after the first reading, to find what people see in it.

Well, what London’s publishers and promoters liked about him, of course, was that Jack London was a socialist. And an atheist. And a flouter of many church rules, including some about the rough raw experience a writer could get through drinking and brawling...he died young. He was not a great writer. White Fang is longer than it needs to be and contains some repetitious phrases chosen mainly to offend Victorians. There’s no explicit sex and, though the human characters are profane men, there’s not enough human conversation to leave room for very much profanity, but London does run the “dog thinks humans are gods” trope into the ground. There’s a tacked-on ending that smells as if it was brought in just to add drama.

But the story does capture some of the ambivalence of our relationship with big wolfish dogs. White Fang is three-quarters wolf; his grandmother was an “Indian” sled dog whose humans tied her out in the woods so her puppies would be half wolf, and one of those pups was Kiche, the mother of White Fang. Kiche doesn’t really belong to a wolf pack but does manage to keep up with a male wolf who’d be her partner for life if she didn’t go back to the human settlement when the humans returned. So White Fang is bigger, stronger, and more aggressive than other sled dogs. In the summer Kiche and White Fang belong, sort of, to a man called Gray Beaver who, among other things, encourages the other dogs to dislike White Fang so that, when they’re all pulling a sled, White Fang is running before a hostile pack who are all chasing him. There’s no kindness in his life. Kiche forgets him after he’s been weaned and she’s had new puppies. White Fang loves to be petted or spoken to kindly, though he’s not sure why, but he seldom is. Only when a hateful man forces White Fang to fight other dogs by way of entertainment, and a visitor from (by then relatively civilized) California rescues him, does White Fang begin to learn to be a pet.

Is this a true story? Did anything like it ever happen? Who knows? Nevertheless, for the work of an antichristian writer who used “dogs think humans are gods” to offend Christians, it manages to be a pretty good metaphor for the Christian gospel story. White Fang kills, from hate and fear as much as hunger, until someone goes out of his way to save him. Thereafter White Fang slowly but enthusiastically becomes a good dog, adoring “the love-master” who guessed that what’s been advertised as a “fighting wolf” has always wanted to be a farmer’s pet.

A lot of dog rescuers want to tame a dog like White Fang. What makes me question how accurately this story was written is that it’s not so easy in real life as the last section of the book makes it seem. The Scotts of fictional Santa Clara are a very lucky family. Even tame sled dogs, police dogs, big wolfish-type dogs in general, can become sources of trouble for people who want to make pets of them. They need safe places to run (far) and play (rough), and good leaders who can keep them occupied with jobs that use their considerable intelligence for good purposes. They can be pathetically easy to teach wrong.

Still, most dogs are at least potentially lovable pets for somebody or other, and there’s something awesome about having a pet who even looks like a wolf.

I can’t say much for the special contents of the copy I have, the introduction by Jim Murphy, who solemnly tells children that socialism is “a social system in which individuals work for the common good of all citizens and not for personal gain,” then proceeds to narrate the biography of a writer who, whatever his emotions may have been, certainly worked for personal gain—and not at the macho heavy-labor sort of jobs he wanted to write about, either. (London did try gold mining in Alaska, but soon became ill and came home. He admired physical strength and hardiness because they were qualities he never had.) Nevertheless, children (and the inner children of adults) have loved White Fang for more than a hundred years and they’ll probably love him for more than another hundred years.