Book review by Alice C: Jack London wrote The Iron Heel, a dystopian novel, in 1908. It sold over 50,000 copies in hardback and according to Wikipedia, London was, for a time, the bestselling and highest earning writer in the USA.
It’s the story of the rise of a totalitarian Oligarchy in the United States and has been an interesting reading during the current international crisis and lock-down when many fear that increased surveillance via mobile Apps, which at first have benign intentions, will eventually result in malign consequences.
The novel is thought to be unusual for its time both for its themes and for the fact it is written by a man but in the voice of a female protagonist, Avis Everhard. Avis has kept a memoir, the ‘Everhard Manuscript’, which is discovered many years after her death, after The Brotherhood of Man and victory for the workers, has finally been established.
The memoir tells of the brutal suppression of a socialist uprising in America at the turn of the 20th century, the unraveling of democracy and the gradual, populist introduction of the Iron Heel, the totalitarian state. The Iron Heel is at first accepted for stability and security it offers the country but then crushes the life out of any opposition, murdering, executing, or condemning to asylums anyone who tried to speak out or complain and the brutal rooting out and suppression of the resistance movement. It is a chilling, depressing read. Many of the aspects of the book seem to foreshadow the repression and horrors of Nazi Germany.
Jack London was an interesting character – he identified as a Socialist, had worked in factories and dockyards, known the poverty of unemployment and had taken part in the march of Kelly’s Army of unemployed men, across America to demand work from the government in Washington.
Although The Iron Heel may have been well received by left-wing comrades and followers of Karl Marx as prefiguring the eventual setting up of a utopian Brotherhood of Man, it was Trotsky himself who pointed out that London’s forecast of the future differed from Marx’s. London could see, for example, that far from uniting the working class, after an uprising the trade unions were likely to be riven apart by self-interest. Trotsky said of The Iron Heel: ‘nobody had imagined so fully the ominous perspective of the alliance between finance capital and labor aristocracy… in 1907 London already foresaw the fascist regime as the inevitable result of the defeat of the proletarian revolution’.
When first published the book had a mixed reception from critics but was well regarded by George Orwell who felt London had constructed a remarkable prediction of the rise of fascism which, according to Orwell’s biographer, later influenced his own dystopian novel – 1984.
Spurred on to read more dystopian fiction, I picked up another Jack London classic The Scarlet Plague, a post-apocalyptic short novel, originally published in The London Magazine in 1912. London must have owned a crystal ball into the future – for a more perfect presentiment of our current Covid 19 crisis would be hard to imagine.
The scarlet plague is a highly contagious plague which kills off most of the world’s population, only those few with natural immunity and those who have self-isolated for many years, survive. The few survivors are then compelled to procreate, and it isn’t just the good and beautiful who survive, survivors have to mate with whoever is left. Culture, learning and science become things of the past as the young and new born can’t imagine the world before the plague and society descends into a more basic and ruthless form of civilization based on survival and procreation. I’d like to read more Jack London but I hope Call of the Wild or White Fang don’t presage the outbreak of plagues of gangs of wild, rabid dogs rampaging our streets!