Just Finished Reading: Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer



I watched this on DVD over the Christmas break and was pretty impressed. I had no idea about the originating book – or any plan to read it – until I saw it on one of our contractor’s desks at work. After a very enjoyable 15 minute chat about the movie she offered to lend the book to me. An offer I gladly took up.


For those of you who haven’t seen the film (which I can heartily recommend) Into the Wild is an investigation of the last few months in the life of Chris McCandless who, in his early 20’s, dropped out of human society, took to the road and eventually ended up in the Alaskan wilderness, a place he had been in love with since reading Jack London’s Call of the Wild. There he took up residence in an abandoned Fairbanks City bus and there he died. Both the book and the film follow the time from his college graduation until his untimely death a few years later. Both book and film chart his withdrawal from modern civilisation and also, slowly, from human companionship itself. The advantage of the book over the film is that it has the time and space to go into much more detail about why such a bright, articulate and principled young man turned his back on just about everything. Although not completely successful on that point – we can never truly know what motivates other people (or ourselves sometimes) – the book does, I think, a creditable job in trying to understand what made Chris do what he did. Drawing on his own experiences in the wild and those of historical figures who seemed to be driven to need similar lifestyles, the author did manage to put him in context, not as an example of crazy, spoilt or disaffected youth but of someone who would have been, in ages past or in centuries still to come, a great explorer of unknown lands.


Although neither the film nor the book resonated very deeply with me – despite the grandeur of the story or the quality of the acting in the movie – I did understand at least part of where Chris was coming from. He saw just how false things are and how what we call civilisation is very often not civilised at all. He saw how badly we often treat our fellow humans and how cravenly we justify this to ourselves and each other. He recognised that buying into the ‘machine’ was a kind of mental and spiritual death that he seemed psychologically incapable of undertaking. So he rejected it all and headed for the hills. Of course it wasn’t that simple. Chris had issues with his father that where never resolved. I also think, more so from the book than the film, that he had underlying psychological problems which manifested themselves from a very early age. Individual human motivation, especially when trying to understand a persons whole life – even one as tragically short as that of Chris McCandless – is often a very complex business well beyond the scope of a 200 page book and certainly beyond a 142 minute movie – no matter how well made. However, both book and film are well worth experiencing if only to have a glimpse of something rare in our technologically obsessed society – someone who is willing to give that all up in order to walk into the wild.