This is the sort of book I loved to devour when I was nine or ten years old. Authors like John Christopher and Nicholas Fisk had a big influence on me and I still enjoy catching up with their work today.

This one is set in a post-apocalypse future where a privileged minority live in high-tech cities. The underclass (called "savages" by the gentry) are banished to the wildlands beyond the city walls, except for a few who are kept as a servant class, effectively slaves.

The protagonist falls foul of the vicious politics of the city leaders and gradually learns how brutal the system is. He finds that life among the rebellious "savages" is better than the comfortable tyranny within the city walls. It's like an inversion of Christopher's earlier novel "The Guardians", where a working class city kid learns about the elite gentry of the English countryside. Both novels, but "Wild Jack" especially, have a whiff of HG Wells' "The Time Machine", with its Eloi gentry and Morlock underclass. Christopher is following the pattern of his "Tripods" trilogy, which is an acknowledged riff on "The War of the Worlds".

As far as I'm concerned the British class system is a travesty, including the ultimate upper class degenerates, the monarchy. Books like this help erase the base propaganda of arse-licking royalist scum, and they are still relevant today. It just occurred to me that I read "Wild Jack" around the 50th anniversary of its first appearance.