![]() This was a popular idea, and dozens of votes were cast for other books. Last week I mooted the idea that we should run a Jack London double-header, since many of his books are so short and since his output was so varied and fascinating. There are more reasons for leaving extra time before embarking on The Iron Heel: it appears to be out of print in the UK ( although freely available online, because it’s out of copyright), so this should provide a bit of time to hunt down copies. ![]() It sounds uncomfortably like your average liberal’s worst fears, and I hardly dare read it until the nightmare of this US election is finally over. It provides a dystopian vision of the US in which the middle class are squeezed out of existence, farmers reduced to serfdom and a few oligarchs control nearly all the wealth, not to mention a private army of mercenaries, and rule – as the title suggests – by stomping on the face of all who oppose them. Orwell called The Iron Heel a “remarkable prophecy of the rise of fascism”. But, however the result goes, this has been a uniquely unsettling and frightening year for the world’s biggest democracy, so it feels fitting that The Iron Heel, London’s book about the collapse of US democracy and brutal rule by a thuggish elite, emerged as the first popular choice in our vote. As I write this, I don’t know who will replace Barack Obama as US president. ![]() It wasn’t just the confusion of the vote that fitted our unsettling times. ![]()
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