Jack London The Jacket

The Star Rover is a novel by American writer Jack London published in 1915 (published in the United Kingdom as The Jacket). It is a story of reincarnation. Read more on Wikipedia

Lowry refers to The Jacketin his novel Under The Volcano when Hugh muses in Chapter 6; "..and perhaps it was true too he had been reading too much Jack London even then, The Sea Wolf, and now in 1938 he had advanced to the virile Valley of the Moon (his favourite was The Jacket)...." (Pg. 161)

Chris Ackerley states; "The novel, perhaps London's best, is about a condemned man, Darrell Standing, an ex-professor of agronomics, who is in San Quentin for murder. He is forced to undergo long spells of solitary confinement inside the "jacket", a straitjacket into which he is tightly laced for up to ten days in a row. His way of surviving is to go "star-roving"; that is, force his mind to eliminate all thoughts of the body and take off into its astral world, transcending the limitations of time and space and getting in touch with its previous existences. The novel celebrates "man's unconquerable will", which even Standing's final death cannot denigrate; the chief irony for Lowry, however, is the relevance of the title to the Consul's fate." (Malcolm Lowry Project)