Smoke Bellew by Jack London

One of the first cultural surprises, that happened after coming to Canada, was looking at the giant map of Canada for the first time, and finding out that the Klondike Gold Rush that I read about in so many Jack London's stories happened in fact, in Canada, not in USA. It felt just so American, you know, that even if there were mentions of Canada we jumped right over them. Not that I knew – or cared to know - a lot about Canada before moving there. It was the place north of USA, the land of randomly cool TV series (Degrassi and Les filles de Caleb) so, naturally I had a lot to learn. Finding Dawson city on the map was one of the first surprises.

I didn't want to re-read Jack London for a long time though, and when I did, last year, I had another surprise: one of my favorite pieces, and the one that is extremely popular and well-loved in Russia, Smoke Bellew is virtually unknown here. It is a later work, published in 1911-12, and Jack London himself called it a hack work, written for money. And yet, it is, I believe, great. I mean, I've read later London's novels that were over-blown, over-melodramatic and rather impossible. Smoke Bellew is none of those things. In fact, it combines the best of both worlds. It is a collection of short stories tied into unity by the same characters (both main and secondary), same time ( Klondike Gold Rush) and same place (Yukon territory). It escapes the the soggy plotting and other problems with novels that Jack London had – most critics agree that Jack London was much better with his short stories than his novels- and yet still allows for character development impossible in a short format.

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