3.5(2)

The Iron Heel

The Iron Heel is a distopian utopian socialist novel, told in first person by someone that have read the manuscript finded in a oak, hidden 600 years ago that tolds the life and adventures of a socialist activist Avis Everhard and her husband Ernst Everhard executed in 1932. The Iron Heel is a story with stories within stories...it’s about a past, a present, and a future...all told from the perspective of a man (Jack London) in 1906...read by current readers almost 100 years later. The Iron Heel foreshadows the current events of today by painting a picture of an oligarchy of the rich disenfranchising the poor and middle class. It’s about a future time with its own history...a substantially fictional history about the very time spanning its writing and our current reading. This fictional writer is the narrator within the story, but there’s another narrator (presenting the whole story) far in the future...looking back and remembering. In short, London has written a multi-level novel, which is, itself, a speculative prophecy of things to come in our own time.