The Star Rover
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The Star Rover is a novel by American writer Jack London published in 1915 (published in England as The Jacket). It is a story of reincarnation. It evokes divided opinion; many London aficionados esteem it highly. It is unlike any other Jack London novel. Biographer Russ Kingman refers to it as marking "an abrupt change in London's literary style."
A framing story is told in the first person by Darrell Standing, a university professor serving life imprisonment in San Quentin for murder. Prison officials try to break his spirit by means of a torture device called "the jacket," a canvas jacket which can be tightly laced so as to compress the whole body, inducing angina. Standing discovers how to withstand the torture by entering a kind of trance state, in which he walks among the stars and experiences portions of past lives.
- I trod interstellar space, exalted by the knowledge that I was bound on vast adventure, where, at the end, I would find all the cosmic formulae and have made clear to me the ultimate secret of the universe. In my hand I carried a long glass wand. It was borne in upon me that with the tip of this wand I must touch each star in passing. And I knew, in all absoluteness, that did I but miss one star I should be precipitated into some unplummeted abyss of unthinkable and eternal punishment and guilt.
The accounts of these past lives form the body of the work. They are in effect a series of powerfully written, but disconnected and unresolved, short stories. The writing sometimes rises to the level of poetry, sometimes sinks to the level of purple prose.
The jacket itself was actually used at San Quentin at the time and Jack London's descriptions of it were based on interviews with a former convict named Ed Morrell, which is also the name of a character in the novel.
The Jacket (2005 movie)
The 2005 movie The Jacket has a story credited to Marc Rocco and Tom Bleecker. Jack London is not mentioned. Nevertheless, the title and story concept suggest a loose connection to the Jack London novel. The movie story concerns a military veteran—named Jack—who is falsely accused of murder and committed to an asylum. (In an earlier version of the script, the setting was a prison). A doctor restrains the protagonist in a jacket-like torture device and locks him in a morgue body drawer. In a state induced by drugs, brain damage, and mistreatment, his brain becomes capable of time travel into the future.
References
- The Stax Report: Script Review of The Jacket (http://web.archive.org/web/20010615043359/http://filmforce.ign.com/articles/36055p1.html) Details on earlier version of script
- A Pictorial Biography of Jack London, Russ Kingman, 1979; "Published for Jack London Research Center by David Rejl, California:" "Abrupt change in London's literary style"