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The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Iron Heel, by Jack London This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions  ‎CHAPTER I · ‎CHAPTER II · ‎CHAPTER IX · ‎CHAPTER XVI.
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He even got the colour right. The story continues to centre around the Everhards as the years go on and the Iron Heel kicks in. Congress is suspended, dissenters are machine-gunned. Scenes of 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. 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. He got a lot more right than he got wrong.

THE IRON HEEL

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, pre-First World War era when the worst nightmare most Western audiences could imagine was a cavalry-charge. These scenes do indeed curdle the blood and wrench the gut, and may have seemed like fantastical pornography at the time.

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 and Big Brother of Orwell, and the mandatory happiness, Soma and biological caste-system 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 white supremacist racism too, his failings could well have turned him to Fascism were it not for the strength of his commitment to the working-class cause.

The cult of personality London indulges in sadly undermines the characterisation of the hero Ernest Everard, who is ever-so-slightly too much of the Nietchzhean superman to convince, even given his occasional endearing awkwardness. He veers too close to an icon in a Soviet mural. There is a slightly stilted characterisation in other main players too. In the grand epic of human destiny being described in book less than pages long, people come can close to being ciphers, including the narrator Avis herself. The Iron Heel is a great deal more than an insightful piece of propaganda however.

London always writes with a stern poetic vividness. The narrative is charged with honest emotional energy, and it convinces as a blood-curdling thriller too. This is a short novel dealing with an enormous scope of ideas and events, essentially attempting to dramatise a Marxian analysis of US society. Yet there is never a dull moment. London has the gift of investing the forays into theory with the same excitement as exists in the scenes of bloody conflict.

Jack London’s The Iron Heel: An enduring classic

And while individual characters may stray near caricature, in the bigger picture London possesses a rather more nuanced insight into the psychology of those at both ends of the class conflict. The workers are the heroes of course, but London does not shirk on the corrupting and brutalising effect revolution inevitably has on its agents.

And, even more importantly, he recognises that the ruling-class are not just crooks and thugs. They, as a class, believed that they alone maintained civilization. It was their belief that if they weakened, the great beast would engulf them, and everything of beauty and wonder and joy and good in its cavernous and slime-dripping maw. Without them, anarchy would reign, and humanity would drop backward into the primitive night out of which it had so painfully emerged……. This was the beast to be stamped on, and the highest duty of the aristocrat was to stamp upon it.

Their cover is nice as well, although very different than the above. Not much to say about the type, but the red and black illustration—definitely by Ken Sprague, this time—is great. A simple yet provocative line drawing of the end of demonstration, where all we can see are the legs and batons of the cops and the abandoned placards of the protesters. Resistance is abandoned, hope on the run.

Resistance is absent from the Bantam mass market edition as well, with a giant spiked boot coming down on the city. This one is quite creepy, the red sky deeply provocative of blood.

Jack London: The Iron Heel

The only other editions from the second half of the 20th century that I could find were an Sagamore Press American Century Series trade paperback and a hardback by Arco. The Sagamore cover is quite strong, black and red torn paper shapes struggle in the background, pushing the author and title to the front. Although I could see this design being specific to the Iron Heel , it is actually the same basic layout as all the American Century Series, which each feature torn paper of various shapes and colors.

As for the Arco, the image not specific to the title, but instead a simple illustration of London himself, likely also part of a series. The design is based on the design of the first edition published by MacMillan, cover below to the left. I actually like this later version much better, the cream cloth provides a much better background for the illustration than the dark blue.

The design on all these editions is cool, but curious.

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Of iron? Below is another set of early editions. In , Regents publishes the edition to the below left, with its nice William Morris-esque floral pattern in sharp contrast to the brutality of the title. The British edition in the middle rectifies that, going for the much more direct representation of a skull super-imposed on a city on fire! And then in , the dust jacket of the Grayson Publishing edition starts the visual trend that dominates the representation of the book from here on out.

At first it looks like the title is simply floating in an odd-shaped black field, but then the eye adjusts, and sees the heel of a shoe. This visual trick is fun, and the terror of being stomped on is a slow burn, rather than being hit over the head with it. Likely the first paperback edition was by Penguin of course , released in in a then-standard orange cover for fiction, and quickly reprinted in In , UK publishing upstarts Rebel, Inc.


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It works OK here, the boot is a little blurry and the black circle design on top is strong enough to set the design within the broader series of the Rebel, Inc. Dozens of foreign language editions have also been released, I found covers for a small handful below. And finely, the somewhat sad but increasing reality of how many of us interact with old and public domain books, through the flood of print-on-demand editions.

These are often strange amalgamations of half-hearted design attempts mixed with clip art and stock imagery, but the sometimes startlingly weird results that combination produces are entirely absent here. The cover on the left is exactly what you would expect if you asked someone who knew little of the book to design a cover, an very literal heel of a boot coming down on the viewer.