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milkfran's review against another edition
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.75
I did a module on the politics of pandemics as part of my degree and I’m also a big sci-fi nerd so I read this one to scratch a particular itch. The good news is that it’s short and sweet and out of copyright so it’s available freely online. Gordon Grant’s illustrations are a nice touch too: more books should have pictures!
The novel is set in 2073 and narrated by ‘Grandser’ a former Professor of English Literature at Berkeley and one of the sole survivors of the eponymous ‘Scarlett Plague’ that ravaged the planet in 2013. He mostly reminisces about what life was like before to his disinterested Grandsons who see him as a strange senile relic.
“Red is red, ain’t it?” Hare-Lip grumbled. “Then what’s the good of gettin’ cocky and calling it scarlet?”
“What is education?” Edwin asked.
“Calling red scarlet,” Hare-Lip sneered”
In all honesty, Jack London’s novel has more value as a historical document than as an enjoyable piece of literature. It’s easy to skip through in an hour or two but it becomes much more interesting when viewed in the context of its time. London wrote it in 1913, 5 years before the Spanish Flu pandemic which killed more people than the civilian and military casualties of the First World War combined twice over.
London’s imagined virus kills people within 15 minutes (in reality this would make it too successful at killing people to spread that far) leaving them to literally drop down dead.
Most plague literature (hi Chaucer) wrestles with the question of plague being a divine retribution for a society’s failings and London- a noted socialist- attempts this somewhat, clumsily blaming overpopulation and overcrowding for the spread of the virus:
“The easier it was to get food, the more men there were; the more men there were, the more thickly were they packed together on the earth; and the more thickly they were packed, the more new kinds of germs became diseases”
Maybe if he’d have been around in 2020 he’d have been on board with capitalism, globalisation and ecological exploitation of our planet as exacerbating factors in the spread of pandemics but it reads more like someone parroting the Social Darwinism that was in vogue around the turn of the century.
Indeed, the racism and Social Darwinism is what really dates this novel and makes it such a product of its time. Grandser clearly dislikes Hoo-Hoo who has inherited the violent tendencies from his Grandfather, ‘Chauffeur’ a working class man who also happens to survive the plague.
“He was a violent, unjust man. Why the plague germs spared him I can never understand. It would seem, in spite of our old metaphysical notions about absolute justice, that there is no justice in the universe. Why did he live?—an iniquitous, moral monster, a blot on the face of nature, a cruel, relentless, bestial cheat as well. All he could talk about was motor cars, machinery, gasoline, and garages—and especially, and with huge delight, of his mean pilferings and sordid swindlings of the persons who had employed him in the days before the coming of the plague. And yet he was spared, while hundreds of millions, yea, billions, of better men were destroyed.”
Chauffeur is made particularly unpleasant by contrasting him with his treatment of his former employer, Vesta, a formerly wealthy woman from ‘noble stock’: (“the perfect flower of generations of the highest culture this planet has ever produced”) who is beaten and enslaved by Chauffeur who delights in making her do manual labour and the reversal of their fortunes.
For instance, Grandser chastises Hoo-Hoo, saying:
“Strange it is to hear the vestiges and remnants of the complicated Aryan speech falling from the lips of a filthy little skin-clad savage. All the world is topsy-turvy. And it has been topsy-turvy ever since the plague.”
Chauffeur and his children are seen to have survived through sheer luck and brute force, and in the new plague stricken world, Darwin’s concept of Survival of the fittest applies on a grand scale in the natural world:
“In the last days of the world before the plague, there were many many very different kinds of dogs—dogs without hair and dogs with warm fur, dogs so small that they would make scarcely a mouthful for other dogs that were as large as mountain lions. Well, all the small dogs, and the weak types, were killed by their fellows. Also, the very large one were not adapted for the wild life and bred out. As a result, the many different kinds of dogs disappeared, and there remained, running in packs, the medium-sized wolfish dogs that you know to-day.”
Towards the end of the book Grandser becomes particularly reflective and the language takes on an almost Biblical tone. In imagining the future of the planet and how to rebuild it from the grim blank slate that the pandemic causes he cannot imagine an alternative.
“The gunpowder will come. Nothing can stop it—the same old story over and over. Man will increase, and men will fight.”
So he urges his Grandsons to also remember that
“all that was lost must be discovered over again. Wherefore, earnestly, I repeat unto you certain things which you must remember and tell to your children after you. You must tell them that when water is made hot by fire, there resides in it a wonderful thing called steam, which is stronger than ten thousand men and which can do all man’s work for him. There are other very useful things. In the lightning flash resides a similarly strong servant of man, which was of old his slave and which some day will be his slave again.”
And so, the cycle continues.
Ultimately, if London meant this to be a critique of early 20th century American society, it’s a clumsy one. In one breath his protagonist critics his Grandsons for descending into savagery whilst rhapsodising about the pre-pandemic world and the entrenched class system that allowed him to be a Professor of Literature at Berkeley whilst others struggled.
TL;DR- It was certainly thought provoking and an interesting from a historical point of view but not one I’d recommend to a casual reader.
“He was a violent, unjust man. Why the plague germs spared him I can never understand. It would seem, in spite of our old metaphysical notions about absolute justice, that there is no justice in the universe. Why did he live?—an iniquitous, moral monster, a blot on the face of nature, a cruel, relentless, bestial cheat as well. All he could talk about was motor cars, machinery, gasoline, and garages—and especially, and with huge delight, of his mean pilferings and sordid swindlings of the persons who had employed him in the days before the coming of the plague. And yet he was spared, while hundreds of millions, yea, billions, of better men were destroyed.”
Chauffeur is made particularly unpleasant by contrasting him with his treatment of his former employer, Vesta, a formerly wealthy woman from ‘noble stock’: (“the perfect flower of generations of the highest culture this planet has ever produced”) who is beaten and enslaved by Chauffeur who delights in making her do manual labour and the reversal of their fortunes.
For instance, Grandser chastises Hoo-Hoo, saying:
“Strange it is to hear the vestiges and remnants of the complicated Aryan speech falling from the lips of a filthy little skin-clad savage. All the world is topsy-turvy. And it has been topsy-turvy ever since the plague.”
Chauffeur and his children are seen to have survived through sheer luck and brute force, and in the new plague stricken world, Darwin’s concept of Survival of the fittest applies on a grand scale in the natural world:
“In the last days of the world before the plague, there were many many very different kinds of dogs—dogs without hair and dogs with warm fur, dogs so small that they would make scarcely a mouthful for other dogs that were as large as mountain lions. Well, all the small dogs, and the weak types, were killed by their fellows. Also, the very large one were not adapted for the wild life and bred out. As a result, the many different kinds of dogs disappeared, and there remained, running in packs, the medium-sized wolfish dogs that you know to-day.”
Towards the end of the book Grandser becomes particularly reflective and the language takes on an almost Biblical tone. In imagining the future of the planet and how to rebuild it from the grim blank slate that the pandemic causes he cannot imagine an alternative.
“The gunpowder will come. Nothing can stop it—the same old story over and over. Man will increase, and men will fight.”
So he urges his Grandsons to also remember that
“all that was lost must be discovered over again. Wherefore, earnestly, I repeat unto you certain things which you must remember and tell to your children after you. You must tell them that when water is made hot by fire, there resides in it a wonderful thing called steam, which is stronger than ten thousand men and which can do all man’s work for him. There are other very useful things. In the lightning flash resides a similarly strong servant of man, which was of old his slave and which some day will be his slave again.”
And so, the cycle continues.
Ultimately, if London meant this to be a critique of early 20th century American society, it’s a clumsy one. In one breath his protagonist critics his Grandsons for descending into savagery whilst rhapsodising about the pre-pandemic world and the entrenched class system that allowed him to be a Professor of Literature at Berkeley whilst others struggled.
TL;DR- It was certainly thought provoking and an interesting from a historical point of view but not one I’d recommend to a casual reader.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Sexual violence, Medical content, Gun violence, Sexism, Vomit, Slavery, Racism, Fire/Fire injury, Death, Pandemic/Epidemic, and Violence
lorraine19's review against another edition
dark
mysterious
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? N/A
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A
3.75
If you do not like the writing style of classic books like White Fang or War of the Worlds, you probably would not like this one. I personally found this one interesting - although a little slow at first.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death, Fire/Fire injury, Grief, Misogyny, Slavery, Classism, Violence, Pandemic/Epidemic, Suicide, Murder, Physical abuse, Suicidal thoughts, and Terminal illness
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