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conflict on a gargantuan scale ensue, interspersed with
the individual intrigues within. The desperate hopes of
the revolutionaries are evocatively told in between the
details of their struggle. There is indeed no compromise
up until an apocalyptic finale.
As prediction, satire and warning, The Iron Heel is in
many ways more prophetic than either Nineteen Eighty
Four or Brave New World. Orwell merely exaggerated,
exemplified and hypertrophied elements of a Stalinist
dictatorship which had existed for decades, while the
ruminations of Huxley set still further in the future
remain something of an allegory. London was describing
with exactitude a streamlined mechanised totalitarian
dictatorship, backed by big business, specifically
designed to crush the labour movement, when no-one
dreamt of such a thing, and which would not actually
be in place for decades.
Of course his vision was vastly off the mark in
many ways. America managed to crush a far weaker
socialist presence by far less draconian methods, and
real fascism arrived on another continent. But then
we’re not currently living in a post-nuclear dictatorship
with cameras in our living rooms, and no-one’s
being bred in tanks yet either. He got a lot more right
than he got wrong.
In The Iron Heel London laid bare the whole machinery
of a mechanised dictatorship, of the class-based
mass murder to come, and did so during a pastoral,
BUY Jack London books online from and
pre-First World War era when the worst nightmare
most Western audiences could imagine was a cavalrycharge.
The novel was ridiculed at the time in popular
reviews because of its bloodthirsty “sensationalism”.
Even London himself may have intended the grotesque
blood-bath he portrays in the novel’s later chapters – the
full-scale warfare between the haves and the nots – as
more hyperbolic warning than prophecy. These scenes
do indeed curdle the blood and wrench the gut, and may
have seemed like fantastical pornography at the time.
But they’re no Somme, and they’re no Auschwitz. The
grim reality dwarfed even his savage imagination.
In other ways, it is not such a mystery why The Iron
Heel has been passed over in favour of its rivals in dystopia.
As a novel of ideas, as an imagining of intricacies
into the minute grim possibility of the future it does
not live up to them. There is no innovation to excite
the troubled imagination as much as the telescreens,
doublethink, Room 101 and Big Brother of Orwell, and
the mandatory happiness, Soma and biological castesystem
in Huxley. Being more narrowly political than
either it does not lend itself to flights of speculative
futuristic fancy. No-one is likely to base a reality TV
show on one of its observations.
Orwell himself noted that there was a strong streak
of the Social Darwinist in London, a sadistic revelling
in the cult of violence and the survival of the fittest.
Given that London was sadly prone to the most vulgar
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