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Review [published August 2006]
Jack London: The Iron Heel
Ben Granger on Jack London’s neglected dystopian novel that rivals
Nineteen Eighty Four and Brave New World in its vision of the future
When it comes to accolades for the most lauded
prophetic dystopian satirical novels of the early
20th century, there’s no doubting which are the big
two. The hyper-Stalinist all-surveillance paranoid
nightmare of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four, and the
distorted DNA-as-play-doh playground of Huxley’s
Brave New World. Occasionally Yevgeny Zamyatin’s
We gets a look-in as a curio, a minor precursor to both,
appearing as it did in 1920, long before that of Huxley
(1932) and Orwell (1949). There is one however which
always gets passed over, despite being written before
both the others, way back in 1908, and overlooked,
despite being written by one of the most widely
revered American authors of all time. That novel is
Jack London’s The Iron Heel. In and out of print for
decades, The Iron Heel has finally been republished in
the last couple of months by Penguin UK.
Orwell’s warning about the grotesque parody of socialism
offered by Stalin and his acolytes which plagued
the 20th century, and the grim auger from Huxley on
the eugenic, anaesthetic aesthetic threatened by scientific
consumerism which stalked both this century and
BUY Jack London books online from and
the last have been analysed, critiqued and celebrated to
death. There is, however, a third more straightforward
great evil of the modern age. The rich crushing the poor,
the propensity of the forces of capital – when vicious
push comes to deadly shove – to react with the most
monstrous and tyrannical violence against the organised
labour which seeks to grab more of its fair share
from them. The evil that led to the bloody regimes of
Hitler, Mussolini, Franco and their tin-pot descendants.
This was prophesied just as uncannily in Jack London’s
long-neglected novel.
The action of the book begins in the years immediately
following when it was written. Labour relations
in the USA are plunging as rapidly as the economy,
while the thuggery of big-business against the unions
increases in turn. Goons break limbs at picket-lines as
families go hungry. No fiction there. Poverty spreads
apace, and slower but just as surely does the Socialist
movement of America (strange fantasy it may seem
now, but as London wrote, the US Socialist Party, led
by Eugene Debs, was growing rapidly, at one point
gathering over a million votes even as its leaders were
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