The Star Rover

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. 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. 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.