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Jack London's "The Iron Heel" is the kind of novel you find yourself recommending with a long list of caveats. Published in 1908, it is widely considered the earliest of the modern dystopias - the spiritual ancestor of "Nineteen Eighty-Four" and a direct influence on Orwell - yet it is also, by most reasonable measures, a poorly made book. The trick is that the flaws never quite manage to extinguish what is genuinely remarkable about it.

The setup is more sophisticated than the novel is usually given credit for. The story arrives as the "Everhard Manuscript", a memoir written by Avis Everhard, an upper-class professor's daughter who has fallen for the socialist firebrand Ernest Everhard, and discovered seven centuries later in the era of the Brotherhood of Man. The scholarly footnotes are supplied by one Anthony Meredith, writing from somewhere around 2600, and they are by turns dry, ironic and rhetorical, gently puncturing Avis's hagiographic account whenever it threatens to inflate her husband into a singular saviour. One of the cleverer touches is Meredith's quiet insistence that Ernest, far from being the architect of the revolution, was a cog in a much larger wheel.

What follows is a clash between the American working class and an oligarchic super-elite that London christens the Iron Heel. Capitalism, in the first half of the book, is dismantled with surprising vigour: there is a real and bracing pleasure in watching London peel back the polite rationalisations of churchmen, philosophers and industrialists in set-piece debate scenes. The most chilling of these comes when the owner of a mill that has maimed a worker leans across the table and tells Ernest, more or less directly, that the ruling class's reply to any challenge will be couched in lead. The scene was drawn from a real evening London himself attended, and it shows.

This is also the half of the book that has earned "The Iron Heel" its uncanny reputation as prophecy. London anticipates, with disconcerting precision, the rise of corporate-fascist states, the co-option and breaking of trade unions, the use of private armies and provocateurs, and the moral self-image of an aristocracy convinced it alone stands between civilisation and barbarism. Reading the long passage in which the oligarchs describe themselves as the bulwark against the great beast of the masses, it is hard not to think of the propaganda of regimes that would not arrive for another quarter-century.

The trouble is that as a piece of fiction, the book frequently stops being one. The opening hundred pages are weighed down with socialist theory delivered in the form of lectures, and Avis often comes across less as a narrator than as an admiring transcriptionist. There is a serious problem with her characterisation, too: she is asked to inhabit two incompatible selves at once, the fluttering young woman of the love story and the hardened underground operative of the political plot, and London never quite manages to dissolve the seam between them. Ernest, meanwhile, is built up as a Nietzschean superman in the opening chapters and then quietly demoted to a supporting role; even his name, Everhard, sits awkwardly on the page in a way the modern reader will struggle to ignore.

It is fair to call this a book written too much from the heart and not enough from the head. London's own relationship with the socialist movement was already fraying by 1907, and the novel betrays the strain. The First Revolt is defeated less by the Oligarchy's cunning than by the supposed stupidity of the masses, and the ultimate triumph of the Brotherhood of Man is pushed so far into the future that it functions more as consolation than argument. The second half loses much of the controlled fury of the first and slips into a sequence of underground escapes and atrocities that feels increasingly schematic.

Even so, it is hard to dismiss. The framing is more ambitious than most of its imitators have attempted, the analysis of how oligarchy entrenches itself remains startlingly current, and several passages have the granite weight of the best political fiction. "The Iron Heel" earns its place as a minor revolutionary classic: flawed, often clumsy, occasionally tedious, and still, more than a century on, worth the patient reader's time. Approach it as a manifesto with a novel wrapped around it, and the bargain becomes much easier to accept.