London is no great prose stylist. I have him in my head next to Steinbeck, because of geographical, historical, and political proximity, but their writing occupies separate universes. The windup was too long. Ernest Everhard was a cardboard cutout of lefty manliness, a rather self-congratulatory "idealized self" of London. Avis was  not a cardboard cutout because she had ideas of her own, was just a little bit bohemian, was ready to fight to the death, but she was pretty thinly characterized, and mostly lacked big-picture agency. She followed the man over whom she swooned rather dissatisfyingly. She is no feminist hero. And that's fine, but it's the flatness of the characters, partly driven by the flatness of the prose in the early going, that I found limiting.

The prose got better as there was more action.

The sociology was a little didactic whenever Ernest was delivering his lessons on socialism, certainly too pat and smugly self-assured in the way that committed Marxists have been for 150 years. Some of the social categories, such as labor castes, and certainly the people of the abyss, didn't seem quite so textbook, though I am no expert in that stuff.

The book (published 1907) is credited with being wildly prescient, e.g., with respect to the rise of fascism, but I don't see it that way. Its materialism is just too strong, and pretty much leaves out all cultural and other immaterial social factors. Its determinism also leads it astray, as history is quite a bit less linear than a simple Marxist teleology --which is what is on offer here-- can handle.

So, anyway, I am glad I read it, and it's holds a good bit of interest, but it's pretty limited.