Check Out Sea Wolf

Sea Wolf Review

Absolutely loved this book!

Humphrey Van Weyden is a 35 year old bookish man who has never had to stand on his own two feet. He almost drowns when the boat he is on collides with another in the San Francisco Bay, but is soon rescued by the Ghost and its captain, Wolf Larsen. Wolf is a Darwinian philosopher of sorts who has taken survival of the fittest to the extreme with his raw, wolf-like savageness. And this savageness, OH YES THIS SAVAGENESS, makes The Sea Wolf one hell of a read!

Wolf exclaims "life was a ferment, a yeasty something which devoured life that it might live, and the living was merely successful piggishness. Why if there is anything in supply and demand, life is the cheapest thing in the world. There is only so much water, so much earth, so much air; but the life that is demanding to be born is limitless. Nature is a spendthrift. Look at the fish and their millions of eggs. For that matter, look at you and me. In our loins are the possibilities of millions of lives. Could we but find time and opportunity and utilize the last bit and every bit of the unborn life that is in us, we could become the fathers of nations and populate continents. Life? Bah! It has no value. Of cheap things it is the cheapest. Everywhere it goes begging. Nature spills it out with a lavish hand. Where there is room for one life, she sows a thousand lives, and its life eats life till the strongest and most piggish life is left."

Make no mistake that Wolf stays true to this philosophy.

Meanwhile, Hump learns to stand on his own two feet in two significant ways - one seemingly unintentional. He unexpectedly becomes an intellectual playmate of Wolf's, which sort of buys him time from Wolf's brutality. Also, he overcomes extreme physical obstacles while on the Ghost and while trying to escape.

During my elation while reading this book I became curious as to why it hadn't made it to the Novel 100 list by Daniel S. Burt or other similar lists. I was thinking 5 STARS! 5 STARs! The dialogue was wonderful and plentiful (in a good way). Wolf's character was amazing in a brutal and sordid way. I think most of us can relate to the fantasy of our primitive selves. Why not one of THE classics?

Well it seems that some of the works referred to in The Sea Wolf are anachronistic and the story itself is considered "patchy". Patchy as in melodramatic (But this was funny and interestingggg....), philosophic debate (INTERESTING!), travelogue (Soooo?), and love story (Yeah...the love story was a bit cheesy. A famous female author just happens to be the one who washes up for the bookish Hump????)

So, 4 stars because of the out of place references and all too convenient terms of the love story, but still, a thrilling read!

Sea Wolf Overview

From the author of "The Call of the Wild" comes the compelling story of the long and perilous sea voyage of Wolf Larsen, captain of the "Ghost", and his reluctant crewman Humphrey Van Weyden.

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Customer Reviews

Decent nautical yarn, ambitious and overachieving. - A. McDonald - New York
As a psychological adventure novel, The Sea Wolf is the story of a writer, Humphrey Van Weyden shipwrecked in the ocean and rescued by the monstrous, brutal captain Wolf Larsen. Van Wedyen is soft, bookish character, and is astonished by the ugly strength and egoism of Larsen. Larsen forces Van Weyden to accompany the ship in its voyage across the ocean to hunt seals, and along the way he learns the toughness of nautical life, measured by the novel's repeated metaphors of callouses and scars on what were his soft, gentleman's hands, and what Larsen calls "standing on his own legs."

There is a weak romantic element tacked onto the story, when the crew rescues a from another shipwreck the poet Maud Brewster, a delicate aesthete and again a foil against Larsen's brutality. Brewster and Van Weyden fall in love in the course of their adventures but the book represses this until a last page kiss. Truly feeble.

But the central failing is that this novel would have been better with a more interesting or believable antagonist. Although reviewers gush about the intensity of the character portrayal of Wolf Larsen -- really, he is not that interesting. Overly talky and one-dimensional despite that, Larsen spouts philosophical cliches (as does Van Weyden) as if he's in a late-night drunken argument in a freshman dorm room. Predictable, and his routine of menacing and bullying doesn't really shock as much as the author thinks it does.

The novel's greatest strength is in the telling of the nautical adventure itself, the sailing of the schooner is wonderfully detailed and the descriptions of the techniques of seal-hunting quite interesting.

Great book and always has been - Lawrence Wegeman, Jr. - Sunrise Beach, TX,
Read it in high school fifty some years ago, and now it's easier to read and buy, on amazon.com's bookstore.

Blunt, forceful, un-cheesy book--weak ending - Daniel Mackler - www.iraresoul.com
I was surprised to discover how excellent this book was. I found the first few pages rather cheesy, but very soon London's character of Wolf Larsen, a brutal and all-powerful sea captain, changed all that. I found him one of the most disturbing and forceful characters in all of literature--a sort of Hitleresque beast, yet created almost thirty years before anyone ever heard of Hitler.

Contrasted with Wolf Larsen is the main character, appropriately named Humphrey, a wimp extraordinaire--who falls prey to the power and control of Larsen, and slowly learns to find himself and his strength in Larsen's midst. However, for maybe the first thirty or forty pages of their interaction, the book seemed a bit over-philosophical, almost teenage in its grand discussion of "life" and "morality" and "humanity" and "death." But then, somehow, Jack London gripped me anyway, and his created world of ultra-violence and distorted masculinity, where physical strength and personal force are everything, became all-too-real, all-too-believable, and all-too-powerful. I couldn't put it down. Kudos to Jack London!

Unfortunately, though, the book peters out in the last few chapters. I don't want to give away the ending, but suffice to say that I felt London just couldn't sustain the story. Yes, intellectually the ending works, but emotionally it doesn't. It turned wooden--and false. I found myself bored at the end, and I hoped that London would somehow redeem it. Alas, he didn't.

But in spite of the cheesy ending the book is still unique--and a worthwhile read. I have trouble imagining anyone writing such a book today.

*** Product Information and Prices Stored: Jul 23, 2010 20:40:06

Children's Books

Friday, July 23, 2010