Disappointing. Lacks the depth of London’s masterful “Call of the Wild” and his brilliant short stories of the North. Other critics agree, but many cite Wolf Larsen as being a well-drawn villain figure. I found his brutishness exaggerated, and his intellectualism hard to swallow. Both Humphrey and Maud are banal and their budding romance is treacle. I would have liked to see a little Victorian-era sex, but these two don’t even kiss till the last page, despite playing Tarzan and Jane for months on an island.

As a muckraking-age social critique, this book may succeed. But as great coming-of-age sea fiction, no. Dana’s “Two Years Before the Mast” and Melville’s “Redburn” and “White-Jacket” are much better.

At times unwittingly comedic, this is really a good book to read, marred by some choices that may, or may not, be intentional. The campiness is all right, I really enjoy it, and also the "adventure book" format reminiscent of Stevenson of having an apparent protagonist who is mainly a narrator, while the apparent antagonist is really the protagonist.

We follow our man Hump in his almost-middle-aged unwilling sea romp on a seal-hunting brig, where the captain, Wolf Larsen, single-handedly decides he is to spend the whole travel toiling to learn to be a virile manly man by basically kidnapping him. In virtue of being an academic literary critic, Hump is a sissy, but he rapidly becomes a swole sailor by sheer virtue of being a white rich man, which we all know that while easily induced by modernity to degenerate into listless soft kids, in fact all hide a core of steel.

And are poor (white) men losers, instead? They might, or might not: that's for genetics to decide, of course. Take our real hero, Wolf Larsen, the ubermensch, a kind of proto-Conan the Barbarian that is capable of pureeing raw potatoes with his grip, is obsessed by Darwinism and tries to make himself an avatar of evolutionary "piggishness" by actively beating everyone, even a freaking shark and his whole complement of sailors, because his body is perfect, not even too big, mind, just caveman strong and Greek-god polished at the same time.

His Nordic race is at the same time the reason for all his perfection and shortcomings: he is of course moody as a sad Viking, and born poor as only a Dane expat in Norway at the tail end of 19th century could be. Also, his momma has been pretty prolific, and there's still another Larsen around, who is both his brother and his deadly enemy: the steamship captain Death Larsen. I kid you not.

The book is in part sea adventure, in part broody Nietzsche-Darwin musing collection, as discussed by people who seem to pointedly avoid both common sense and the real spirit of what those two shrewd guys meant about individualism and evolution. The counterpoint is the even weaker "common decency" point of view of our man Hump. Yet, when Wolf Larsen is not speaking, he is kicking butt, torturing and tormenting anything in reach, and THAT is pretty funny.

Sadly, London drops quite badly the ball when a woman is saved from a wreckage. This girl is everything a female character should NOT be, and remains static and pretty much just a motivation for Hump to fight both nature and man to save himself and reproduce. Which is kind of far more Darwin-like than everything about Wolf Larsen. The fact that all this is pretty comical and not quite the deadly serious twist of fate it was intended to be seems to escape both characters and author.

This book could be far better than it is, and if I seem to be stern in my judgement, I will try to phrase it better: it's an incredibly campy, entertainment-oriented pulp adventure that deserves to be read out of its FUN potential. Sometimes you roll your eyes at the Author, but I feel it's part of the charm.

You really need to be fucking brave to write this book, and London was. I can't give it more than three stars, but I really enjoyed every minute of it.

Fair winds, Wolf Larsen.