The Foreword's Footnotes

The Iron Heel has a peculiar architecture that I haven't seen anywhere else quite like it.

The book is a manuscript — Avis Everhard's first-person account of the years 1912-1918, written during the days before the Second Revolt of 1932. But it is presented to us not directly. It is presented to us via a 27th-century editor named Anthony Meredith, writing from a place called Ardis in the year 419 B.O.M. (Brotherhood of Man), which is roughly 2600 A.D.

Meredith's foreword tells us, immediately, that the manuscript is "not an important historical document." It bristles with errors — not of fact, but of interpretation. Avis was too close. She lacked perspective. She was biased by love.

And then Meredith vanishes, and Avis speaks for 25 chapters.

But Meredith doesn't completely vanish. He returns, constantly, as footnotes. Hundreds of them. Every few pages there's a footnote from the future, clarifying, confirming, adding context. Sometimes they're simple: "In those days, groups of predatory individuals controlled all the means of transportation." Sometimes they're devastating: the Epilogue tells us the manuscript breaks off mid-sentence because Avis was about to be captured by Mercenaries, and she hid it in an oak tree, and was presumably executed, and the mystery of Ernest Everhard's execution "has shrouded for seven centuries" — was never cleared up.

The gap between what the foreword says and what the manuscript does is the book's central effect.

Meredith says Avis was too close, too biased. But the manuscript's power is precisely her closeness. We don't want a historian's report. We want to know what it felt like when the Oligarchy first started to harden around the country like cooling iron. We want to know about Jackson's arm, and Peter Donnelly's burned soul, and the Bishop being led off the stage. The foreword's criticism ("she lacked perspective") is itself a form of perspective that erases exactly what makes her testimony valuable.

The footnotes do something similar but more specific. They confirm. Over and over, Avis reports what Ernest said was happening, or what the socialists feared would happen, and the footnote says: yes, he was right. The Dick Act was real. The surplus value argument was correct. The favored labor castes did arise and did ossify into hereditary castes. "Everhard's social foresight was remarkable."

This is an unusual choice. Usually we don't trust first-person narrators, especially ones writing about people they love. The footnotes are London's device for certifying the manuscript — for saying: yes, she was right about the facts even if she was biased about her husband. The scholars from the future have access to the Congressional Record, to the actual economics statistics, to the full history. And they keep confirming what Avis and Ernest saw.

So the structure creates a strange double authority. Meredith has historical perspective but loses the feel. Avis has the feel but is inside the catastrophe. Neither alone is sufficient. Together they make a kind of stereoscopic vision — two different eyes at different distances, and the three-dimensional object between them is the truth of what happened.

And then the manuscript breaks off.

"This is the end of the Everhard Manuscript. It breaks off abruptly in the middle of a sentence. She must have received warning of the coming of the Mercenaries."

No "And they lived happily ever after." No "the Cause prevailed." Just: she must have heard them coming. She hid it quickly. She never came back.

Seven hundred years later, someone found it in an oak tree.

The manuscript was written to be published immediately, after the Second Revolt succeeded. Instead it sat in the tree for seven centuries, through Revolts Three, Four, and many more, all drowned in blood, until the world-movement of labor finally came into its own. Avis wrote it as a victory announcement. It became a testament.

That's the foreword's real function: it tells you how the story ends before the story begins. The Iron Heel lasted three centuries. The Everhards lost. But the fact that Meredith can write "419 B.O.M." tells you that eventually — eventually — it was over.

So London gives you the catastrophe in full, without false consolation. And he gives you the consolation at the very beginning, before you've earned it or felt the weight of what it's consoling.

By the end, you understand why it had to be given first. Because you couldn't survive it otherwise.