Critical Assessment "The key to London's effectiveness is to be found in his complete absorption in the world he evokes. The author is in and committed to his creations to a degree very nearly unparalleled in the composition of fiction. The resulting go-for-broke, event-intoxicated, headlong wild-Irish prose-fury completely overrides a great many stylistic lapses and crudities that would ordinarily cause readers to smile. . . . "He is an artist of violent action, exemplifying what the American poet Allen Tate meant when he said: 'I think of my poems as commentaries on those human situations from which there is no escape.' [...]