“Burning Daylight.”

Maoriland Worker, Volume 2, Issue 42, 22 December 1911, Page 8

“Burning Daylight.”

Jack London's latest novel is still another pourtrayal of the primitive in combat with the veneer. Some one has said "All civilisation is veneer" ; and regarding most of the veneer as sickly and weak, Jack London seems to delight in stripping it away and idealising the usually hidden source and cause.

Burning • Daylight is one of those "rough diamonds", whose school is the world and whose guiding test in life is winning, whether it be against elements or against mankind. >■ Daylight is adventurous, hardy, elemental. The hardships he surmounts and the struggles he conquers are depicted with brilliant vigor and realism. He does deeds of valor and glory in conflict with Nature, endures ; and endures and again; endures, attdoui of exploration and gold-prospecting emerges α-ich. Theii he comes to[ San Francisco, and this is what he is made to perceive:

Society, as - organised'i was a vast bunco game. . > .Work, legitimate work, was the of all wealth. That was to say, whether it was a sack of potatoes, a grand piano, or a seven-passenger touring car. it came into being only by the performance of work. Where the bunco cam© in was in the distribution of these things aftex labor had created them. He failed to see the horny-handed sons of toil enjoying grand pianos or riding in atitomobiles. How this came about was explained by the bunco. By tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands men sat xip nights and schemed how they could get between the workers and the things the. workers produced. These schemers were the business men. When they got between the worker and his product, they took a whack out of~it for themselves. The size of the whack was determined by no rule of equity, but by their own strength and swinishness. ,. He meets Dede Mason., who asks: "But why don't you do good with all your money?" Daylight laughed. "Doing good with you; noney! It's like slapping God in the face, as much as to tell Him that He don't know how to run His world, and that you'll be much obliged if He'll stand out of the way and give You a chance. Thinking about God doesn't keep mc sitting up nights, so I've got another way of looking at it. Ain't it funny, to go around with brass kirucklers aiid a big club breaking folks' heads and taking their money away from them until I've got a pile, and then, repenting of my ways, going round and bandaging up the heads the other robbers are breaking? I leave it to you. That's what doing good with money amounts to. Every once in a while some robber turns* soft-hearted and takes to driving an ambulance. That's what Carnegie did. He smashed heads in pitched battles at Homestead, regular wholesale head-breaker he was, held up the suckers for a few hundred million, and now he goes around dribbling it back to them. Funny? I leave it to you." The above are .characteristic excerpts, but you must not think the book is all of this sort. It is full of incident, and contains not a little of one of the most extraordinary of courtships. Perhaps xhe readen will recall that in October last "The Worker" printed an extract delineatory of the passionate lure and lust of the digger for the gold he tracks and traces as a bloodhound its prey. In this style of portraiture London is masterly. "Burning Daylight" is a story for the man who enjoys seeing "the game" fought with bare knuckles. . Whether Daylight be amongst the snow and sledges, or amongst the revellers at the isolated hostelries of strange parts, or amongst the high fiuancbrs <if Sail Francisco, or amongst

the simplicity and wifehood of his bush settlement, ; he is never, anything but absorbingly interesting.and hugely admirable. ' ■■■ ■. : • .