The Jacket (Star-Rover)

By Jack London

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"The Jacket (Star-Rover)" by Jack London is a novel that exposes the physical and mental hardship inmates experience in prison in the early 1900s. Darrell Standing, a university professor is serving life in San Quentin prison for murder and must learn how to stay alive while being tortured. As the main source of torture, the prison officers use a canvas jacket that compresses and cuts off the blood flow in the entire body.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trajectory, Inc.
• Release date: Oct 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781632096050

Jack London

Jack London was born in San Francisco in 1876, and was a prolific and successful writer until his death in 1916. During his lifetime he wrote novels, short stories and essays, and is best known for ‘The Call of the Wild’ and ‘White Fang’.

Reviews for The Jacket (Star-Rover)

[bayardus-1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

The main character Darrell Standing either A) hallucinates a whole lot while awaiting his execution, or B) actually experiences a series of his past lives. Either way, London presents the idea in the most boring way possible.

Let's get option A out of the way first, because there's definitely a dismissive tone toward this possibility in the book. Could this be a case of unreliable narrator? Sure, but London does nothing to emphasize this point or explore it in any interesting way, so I'd say the tired "unreliable narrator" angle, while not falsifiable, is definitely less favored by the text. If it is supposed to be what was happening in this book then London fails because Standing's hallucinations tell us nothing about him. Hallucinations are necessarily representative of the character who has them, but yet after reading a book of Standing's hallucinations he's just as much of an uninteresting standard male narrator as ever. If London wanted to give us an interesting story of hallucinations brought on by extended confinement he should have written a less bland protagonist.

The other option more favored by the text (albeit this comes from the text being narrated by the character) is that the visions he has are of real past lives. If this is the case, London's error was in giving the narrator some terribly boring past lives. Standing basically has been a Western European male for the majority of his past lives, even when his past self makes his way to Asia it's in the form of a shipwrecked white guy. There's one throwaway line where Standing mentions one of his past lives being a woman, but otherwise the past lives of Standing are strikingly similar to him. The result is that, instead of these visions forcing Standing to have a deeper understanding of the existence of all people and the roles in society we have Standing use the visions as basically a really immersive television that he can use to entertain himself in prison. In the end he doesn't fear execution since he'll just get another life after this one, but that's such a basic and boring realization to get- he could have figured that out from the very first time he experienced a past life, so having lived dozens of lives seemingly caused absolutely no growth as a human being.

It's a potentially interesting concept that Jack London does absolutely nothing of interest with, and Jack's writing ability is far too weak to save it. The Star Rover is decidedly below average.

[knownever · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Jack London is a master of creating homosocial worlds. The book's got all the inevitable drawbacks of something bathed in Western, patriarchal, hetero centrism, but it's also real weird. Clearly, the book's strange narrative conceit (a prisoner in solitary regressing back through past lives and then making sweeping religious, scientific, and philosophical claims) and uneven pacing explain why it's fallen out of favor. Still, if you like Jack London here's further proof that he's a little gay* and a little kinky**.*as all men in a world where only men are people must be**as everyone who glories in rugged, masochistic masculinities is likely to be

[kslade-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

OK stories about time travel and history. The part about the Mountain Meadows Massacre surprised me since it was the first I heard of it and I am LDS. I had to ask around about it. That led me to Juanita Brooks' book on the massacre.

[drardavis · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I read this as an alternate reality, sci-fi novel. Not many non-sci-fi novels would mention squaring the circle and other mathematical concepts. The main character is a prisoner in solitary about to be hanged. He escapes. Well, he escapes into past lives, because, “the spirit is the reality that endures.” And these alternate realities are perhaps the best parts of the book. They are great adventure stories with lots of action, as one would expect of London. Back in solitary, inside a straight jacket, you can’t expect much action. This is where London provides plausible philosophical and scientific explanations for how the hero manages to separate his consciousness from his body. It is also where he makes his case against society and the brutality of the prisons of the day.

[toddsherman · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Warden Atherton, after a hard struggle, managed to insert his forefinger between the lacing and my back. He brought his foot to bear upon me, with the weight of his body added to his foot, and pulled, but failed to get any fraction of an inch of slack.“I take my hat off to you, Hutchins,” he said. “You know your job. Now roll him over and let’s look at him.”They rolled me over on my back. I stared up at them with bulging eyes. This I know: Had they laced me in such fashion the first time I went into the jacket, I should surely have died in the first ten minutes. But I was well trained. I had behind me the thousands of hours in the jacket and, plus that, I had faith in what Morrell had told me.“Now, laugh, damn you, laugh,” said the warden to me. “Start that smile you’ve been bragging about.”So, while my lungs panted for a little air, while my heart threatened to burst, while my mind reeled, nevertheless I was able to smile up into the warden’s face.—The Star Rover by Jack LondonAfter over three weeks I was able to run for thirty-five minutes on that oh-so-freshly healed (heeled—Ha!) left calf muscle; if run it could be called. A new coat of paint applied to the shady side of a garage midwinter dries quicker. However, since mind and body are so inextricably tied to my human persona (oh, you know alien flesh wriggles beneath such thin skin, to be sure), that bloated half hour felt like a major victory. Honestly, I can’t believe the paint dried in that blizzard.This miniature masterpiece by Jack London helped me get through. My job, too, since sometimes I feel straight-jacketed to the VPN and constant need upon need upon need. I’d lost ultimate faith in humanity back when I’d read Orwell’s “1984” (as if there’s another). “The Star Rover” has given me back my belief in the indomitability of the human spirit. And written over one-hundred years ago. Quite a feat. Kind of like astral projecting, beating on globes of gas with sticks, zipping through past lives like most people churn through whatever steaming plate of pabulum prime time is currently serving. And I’ll keep limping behind that whizzing soul until I catch up with him.

[thecrow2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Jack London`s book is a so called reincarnation story which was a popular genre at the beginning of the 20th century. The main character in the prison `fleeing` from the torture of the sadistic director, in a deep catatonic state relives his previous lives. A wouldn`t call it fantasy in a modern way but a very interesting read if one wants to discover the origins of the genre.And not like lots of others really enjoyed that the main character is an antipathic and arrogant man.

[lorifox · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Jack London’s last book written before he died, it’s well written and easy to get absorbed into the story. Based on interviews with an actual San Quentin inmate, it wavers in between reality and imagination. Each character is very believable, and London’s descriptions are perfect: not too detailed, but detailed enough to make every part seem more real than fantasy. I loved it.

[isabelx_21 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Ah, what royal memories are mine, as I flutter through the aeons of the long ago. In single jacket trances I have lived the many lives involved in the thousand-years-long Odysseys of the early drifts of men. Heavens, before I was of the flaxen-haired Aesir, who dwelt in Asgard, and before I was of the red-haired Vanir, who dwelt in Vanaheim, long before those times I have memories (living memories) of earlier drifts, when, like thistledown before the breeze, we drifted south before the face of the descending polar ice-cap.I have died of frost and famine, fight and flood. I have picked berries on the bleak backbone of the world, and I have dug roots to eat from the fat-soiled fens and meadows. I have scratched the reindeer’s semblance and the semblance of the hairy mammoth on ivory tusks gotten of the chase and on the rock walls of cave shelters when the winter storms moaned outside. I have cracked marrow-bones on the sites of kingly cities that had perished centuries before my time or that were destined to be builded centuries after my passing. And I have left the bones of my transient carcasses in pond bottoms, and glacial gravels, and asphaltum lakes.I have lived through the ages known to-day among the scientists as the Paleolithic, the Neolithic, and the Bronze. I remember when with our domesticated wolves we herded our reindeer to pasture on the north shore of the Mediterranean where now are France and Italy and Spain. This was before the ice-sheet melted backward toward the pole. Many processions of the equinoxes have I lived through and died in, my reader . . . only that I remember and that you do not.This story is supposedly a biographical tale written by Darrell Standing, a prisoner on death row who will shortly be hanged. It tells the story of his time in prison and what happened in many of his previous lives, which he has experienced via a type of astral projection during his time in solitary confinement where he was punished for his intransigence by spending long periods of time in a strait-jacket. To start with I was finding it quite hard-going as prison stories aren't really my cup of tea, but one it got past his description of a past life that ended in him fighting three duels in one night in Mediaeval France, and on to more interesting lives, I started to enjoy it much more. The British title for this book is "The Jacket" and that title makes sense as it is the story of a prisoner in solitary confinement who is punished by longer and longer times spent in a strait-jacket, but I for most of the book I was wondering why the American title is "The Star Rover", since Darryl Standing's journeys are back into his previous lives rather than into the stars, and it is only near the end, while discussing man's eternal need of woman that it becomes clear: Always has woman crouched close to earth like a partridge hen mothering her young; always has my wantonness of roving led me out on the shining ways; and always have my star-paths returned me to her, the figure everlasting, the woman, the one woman, for whose arms I had such need that clasped in them I have forgotten the stars.

[polaris4_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An unusual book, and not like London's other work. The 'stories within the story' setup is both great fun and the whole thing is quite a memorable read.

[bzedan_2 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Friggin' trip. The guy examines his previous lives via meditation/hypnosis during horrifically long periods in a sort of straight jacket. Kind of a bunch of short stories put together, which I guess was London's thing? Interesting tie-together at the end, which I don't know how I feel about. I get the feeling that London didn't like making endings, or couldn't do it well, so did what he could. There is a way that short fiction ends that can be less—secure? Something like that. His endings have that flavour.