The Inheritors

by William Golding

When the spring came the people - what was left of them - moved back by the old paths from the sea. But this year strange things were happening, terrifying things that had never happened before. Inexplicable sounds and smells; new, unimaginable creatures half glimpsed through the leaves. What the people didn't, and perhaps never would, know, was that the day of their people was already over.

From the author of Lord of the Flies, The Inheritors is a startling recreation of the lost world of the Neanderthals, and a frightening vision of the beginning of a new age.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Classics, Science Fiction, Literature, Historical, Prehistory

233 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1955

About the author

Sir William Gerald Golding was a British novelist, playwright, and poet. Best known for his debut novel Lord of the Flies (1954), he published another twelve volumes of fiction in his lifetime. In 1980, he was awarded the Booker Prize for Rites of Passage, the first novel in what became his sea trilogy, To the Ends of the Earth. He was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Literature.
As a result of his contributions to literature, Golding was knighted in 1988. He was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 2008, The Times ranked Golding third on its list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".

Reviews

[Brad · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this twice in close succession. I read it, then I read it again. The two readings were necessary, and not because William Golding failed in any way, but because his novel, The Inheritors welcomes so much failure from his readers -- I don't say this lightly.

I taught this for the first time this year, and it was beyond my first year university students. The Inheritors challenges. It challenges readers to work hard. It challenges readers to pay attention. It challenges readers to empathize. It challenges readers to think about themselves and humanity. It challenges readers to consider other ways of seeing the world. It challenges readers to question the things they hold true. It challenges readers to look in the mirror. It challenges readers to actually read!

The Inheritors is a damning criticism of us and what makes us us. It is an attack on the civilizing drive of humans and a call to consider the wreckage we left behind and continue to create.

Mostly it is a scream into a vaccuum that swallows all sound, reminding me of my favourite contemporary authors, like ki hope, who can imagine others that the rest of us wouldn't even remember let alone imagine. It reminds me how much I miss the people (... or that person ...) that voice such important messages.

The Inheritors is a difficult read. But a necessary one for anyone who cares about life and living.

[Jan-Maat]

Reading this I have a sense of journeying into the author's interior life, in a steamboat, chugging upstream. The jungle closes in around us and fog descends on the water. Cut the engine. This is the Heart of Darkness. The author's cry is short: the horror, the horror.

Golding was working as a teacher when he wrote Lord of the Flies and this is his second novel, which deals with a group of Neanderthals encountering a group of the more sophisticated Cro-Magnons. Working as teacher and dealing with schoolboys provided all the inspiration and material he needed for the two novels. Thinking of them, I have a picture of a troubled man waist, then shoulder, deep in boys, only a slender cane to prevent the broiling mass of savagery from boiling over. That savagery, however, was within him. The fiction sprung from his head, fully formed and armed, not those of his pupils, who with their satchels' and shining morning faces, unwilling crept to school.

His first two books work together with The Inheritors reinforcing the point made by Lord of the Flies. It is not simply that modern people are horrible - they always were so, not just as children but even in prehistory. We observe Golding's ancestors who will inherit the earth. They lie, they are violent, they do and make strange things contrary to the natural order. Their teeth remember the wolf. They can harbour murderous intent against each other. It is the Neanderthals who provide an optimistic picture of what humans might have been.

The artistry of this novel is that, with the exception of the very end of the book, it is written from the point of view of the Neanderthals. Golding seeks to take us in to the mind of one of them, Lok, perhaps the dimmest of the group. The use of language has to be understandable but alien, unmodern. Just as the story is set in England that is not yet England, but still Eden so too the language has to take us back before the Fall.

Here are some examples that I'll set aside in spoiler text for the benefit of anyone who wishes to read this novel and find its surprises for themselves: Golding seeks to present what is explicable to us from the point of view of someone who has never who has never experience the like of them before, here our view point character is shot at
Suddenly Lok understood that the man was holding the stick to him but neither he nor Lok could reach across the river. He would have laughed if it were not for the echo of the screaming in his head. The stick began to grow shorter at both ends. Then it shot out to full length again.
The dead tree by Lok's ear acquired a voice.
"Clop!"
His ears twitched and he turned to the tree. By his face there had grown a twig p96
here he is drunk
The fall was roaring in the clearing, inside Lok's head. The trees were moving faster. He sprang to his feet and found that the ground was a perilous as a log. He struck at a tree as it came past to keep it still and then he was lying on his back with the sky spinning over him. p192
.

Golding's Neanderthals, unlike his imagined children, are innocent and presented as part of the natural order. They flow with the current and cannot conceive of any alternative. The structure of their minds seems to prevent them from escaping innocence, they cannot break Nature's social union. They seem even incapable of sexual violence towards each other (a concern for Golding who assaulted a teenaged girl as a young man, you can see these first two novels as driven by the memory of that). Nor will they kill an animal except apparently frogs, frogs it seems, were fair game but will only scavenge those killed by other beasts.

Their nature has to be sweet to be in absolute contrast to the modern humans. These are creatures born of Thomas Hobbes' imagination; fearful, inventive and dangerous. They are capable of anything, they travel against the current, up stream, up and over a waterfall. They will not live in nature's embrace. Yet the Neanderthals can only look on them with wonder, apprehension and love.

The introduction makes play with the difference between Golding's parents. His father representing a rational and scientific outlook, his mother a more mystical and spiritual one. In Lord of the Flies those elements are mixed among the boys here Golding creates a sense of a deeper cleavage, the mystical and the spiritual are modern human modes of being that don't seem even to approximate the Neanderthals pure existence in nature. So completely a part of it that disobedience and sin would be impossible for them.

I am still not sure what to make of this novel, here is another genuine spoiler the Homo Sapiens call the Neanderthals 'Devils' and there is a long sequence in which Lok and the Neanderthal woman Fa are hidden in a tree and watch the doings of 'the new people'. They see the Old Man attempting to eat in private the meat he is hiding from the others, they see them getting drunk, they see the sex (or rape? or adultery?) between two of the New People. Lok, watching is aroused. Who else watches 'the new people' and is aroused by their love - Lucifer in Paradise Lost which Golding is playfully inverting here.

[Ian · Rating 4 out of 5]

I recently commented on a GR Friend’s review of Lord of the Flies, which I had read as a school text nearly 50 years ago. It got me thinking that I had never read anything else by William Golding, which was what led me to choose this book.

The story is set in prehistory and told from the perspective of a small group of early humans, that the reader assumes are Neanderthals. The novel was published in 1955 and Golding’s treatment of the Neanderthals is not scientific, but this is a work of fiction and I have taken it in that spirit. The group consists of six adults and two children, and the particular point of view is that of a male called Lok. Of the six adults he seems to have the most trouble with abstract thought, although all of the group struggle with that. They also have difficulty with articulating their thoughts and therefore with communicating complex ideas and with solving new problems.

Although the novel was written in 1955, the Neanderthals conform to a sort of “New Age” vision of prehistoric society. They are peaceful and gentle, and worship an Earth-mother goddess. The plot of the novel is based on the group’s encounter with a group of early modern humans, who by contrast are warlike and aggressive and who are cruel even to each other. They also have a technology well in advance of Lok’s group. Lok in particular cannot understand the behaviour of “The Others”. At one point they shoot two arrows at him. The arrows miss but Lok, who cannot conceive of what an arrow is or the mechanism by which it is launched, imagines that the “twigs” have been thrown to him as some sort of gift. He retrieves one and carries it around lovingly.

In some ways the novel was like a sci-fi alien invasion story. It’s just that it’s our ancestors who are the aggressive alien invaders.

There are obvious parallels with the themes Golding explored in LotF.

The Neanderthals fear “The Others” but are also drawn to them, by their strangeness and the newness of the things they see. There are large parts of the book where Lok observes the modern humans from hidden vantage points. Golding writes these sections from Lok’s perspective, which is that of someone who does not understand what he sees, and who can’t fully describe it. As a result, it is sometimes difficult for the reader to understand what exactly is going on. I daresay this won’t be to every reader’s taste, but it was clearly a deliberate decision by Golding, to let us see the world through Lok’s eyes, and it’s quite skilfully done.

There’s a change with the last two chapters. The penultimate one provides us with an omniscient perspective on the end of the story, and the last chapter is told from the perspective of one of the modern humans. It makes an interesting contrast to Lok’s.

I liked this one. It's unusual. I was emotionally engaged with Lok and his band, and I was impressed with the way Golding used language to provide us with Lok’s worldview.

[Doug H · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mal was strong and find much food. But Mal die. He sleep in belly of Oa now.

Ha is strong but Ha fall in water. Oh no! Ha not like water!

Lok is strong but Lok stupid. Lok not make good mind pictures.

Lok look for Ha and smell other man. Who is other man?

Doug not care.

Doug bored.

Doug give up.

[Marc · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a downright experimental novel, not so much because of the form, but the angle: Golding tries to evoke the mental attitude of a former human species. It is often said that he takes the perspective of a Neanderthal, and perhaps Golding may have intended that when he wrote this in 1954, but the designation is nowhere in this novel, nor is it really relevant. Because the problem is that one is inclined to mirror the current knowledge of the life of the real Neanderthals (or at least the theories on them) against what Golding makes of it, and of course you have to conclude that several of his asumptions were wrong.

No, I think it makes more sense to approach this novel as an alternative attempt by Golding to look at our human species, the 'homo sapiens', basically as he did in Lord of the Flies, his best-known book, that he wrote just before this one. 'Lord of the Flies' was genial in its simplicity, and shocking in its sketch of the inhumane side of man, through supposedly innocent children. In 'The Inheritors', Golding uses a more primitive human form to look from a distance at the new/different humans, in whom we clearly recognize our species, the 'homo sapiens'. And the bottom line is clear: the supposedly more primitive species may have only a limited form of communication (they talk about abstract images in the form of 'pictures'), and still moves on 4 limbs, but it forms a close-knit, caring group with warm feelings for each other; the new people on the contrary are noisy, use extensive language, have rituals and are very ingenious, but are also downright violent towards each other and towards strangers, and they also have a hierarchical relationship. That contrast is very clear, and once again very derogatory for our species.

In this novel Golding mainly uses the perspective of the earlier, more primitive human form, and especially of the young male Lok. Lok tries to interpret everything he sees, hears and smells as well as possible, out of a good-natured and open naiveté. Communication takes place through images, in which certain phenomena are named in a very inadequate and for us often incomprehensible way. That makes the reading of this novel a heavy burden. Regularly the meaning of what was written or said, escaped me, because I did not understand exactly what was referred to, and perhaps that was what Golding intended. In that sense, the experiment certainly was successful, but it makes it very difficult for a reader to empathize with the story.

Personally, I am quite averse to romantic depictions in the genre of the 'noble savage', and that is something that really bothered me in this novel: the primitive Lok and his group are clearly presented as more 'human', more humane, than the new 'civilised' species. This is done without the subtlety that can be found in Lord of the Flies. In that sense, I think Golding's experiment has failed. But his attempt to recreate the mental world of another kind of human species is certainly a fascinating and commendable experiment.

[Warwick · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Inheritors is a rare attempt to portray the human race from the outside looking in: told from the point of view of a group of Neanderthals having their first, fatal, encounter with this new and dangerously clever species.

As a palaeontological study this book may not be strictly accurate or even fully convincing, but as a prose experiment it's frankly astonishing and exactly the sort of thing top-level novelists should be trying to do. The efforts to give us a sense of how life was lived for a more primitive (sub-)species can be very moving. The extended family unit in the book has a basic language, a sense of common purpose which borders on the telepathic, and an ability – ‘so nearly like thinking’ as Golding puts it at one point – to form mental ‘pictures’ of possible consequences and communicate them to others.

We know, of course, that Neanderthals didn't last, and Golding makes the most of this in-built pathos from the very start. ‘The people’ are painted as a peaceful group, whose primitive, quasi-religious beliefs mean they are reluctant to kill other animals. Their encounter with Homo sapiens will show them that other creatures have no such qualms. Golding's moral – that humans attained their prominence only because they were unusually destructive – can be argued with, but is no less powerful when dramatised like this.

Actually, let me turn that around and say: Golding's moral may be powerful, but it can still be argued with. The book has been rightly praised for its unflinching assessment of the human character, but to make his point he has to ignore those facts that go against it. It's probably disingenuous to portray the Neanderthals as nature-loving folk who abhor murder; what makes humans destructive is not a qualitative difference with other animals, but an intelligence which allows us to be cruel on a much larger scale.

And further: that intelligence also allows us to go beyond animal instinct, which means that as well as increased cruelty there is also sympathy. What bothers me is not the book's argument, which is brilliantly made, but rather a response to the book which assumes that this is the whole story.

Lok's final death-cry will stay with you, and so will the melancholy thoughts of one of the humans, who sails away wondering futilely, ‘Who would sharpen a point against the darkness of the world?’ People who want to look at our species through rose-tinted glasses need these reminders. But equally, those who want to see us as purely cruel and instinctive are taking Golding's message without remembering the crucial point that his species is able to write a book at all, and willing at least to try to inhabit the thoughts and feelings of others. This novel is a dark and wonderful thesis, but its existence holds the clue to its own counter-argument.

[Nandakishore Mridula · Rating 4 out of 5]

William Golding has a very low opinion of the homo sapiens. He has made it clear in Lord of the Flies, where a group of boys stranded on an island after a plane crash very soon revert to savagery. In this book, Golding makes another damning accusation: we are the dominant and successful species because of our savagery.

The book is written from the POV of the Neanderthals, a species of hominids who disappeared from prehistory as humanity advanced triumphantly. Even though we still do not know the reasons for their disappearance fully, Golding is pretty sure - they were wiped out by the murderous homo sapiens. In this book, we see these peaceful race ruthlessly subjugated and then wiped out by the stronger species.

What Golding does through this narrative is not provide a plausible reason for the disappearance of the Neanderthals: what he does is to hold a mirror up and force one to look inside oneself, on what makes one human. And what the reader sees is not pleasant.

[Mike Mason · Rating 5 out of 5]

Now thanks to Quo’s (Bill’s) review of The Spire I came back to Golding after reading Lord of the Flies eons ago. The Inheritors is the third of his novels and surprisingly for me I have read all three…in order.

Story of a small group of Neanderthal’s ( peace loving, only eat meat that has not been killed by them, connecting through images in their head). Meeting a small group of homo sapiens ( using bows and arrows and other weapons, killing animals, drinking alcohol- fermented honey). The homo sapiens kill some of the Neanderthals and capture a young child.

Brilliant writing, well paced and deeply evocative of the times and peoples. I will remember Lok and Fa for a long time. (John Fogerty at Glastonbury so will finish now).

[Ensiform · Rating 4 out of 5]

The story of the gentle, mostly vegetarian Neanderthal tribe that is all but obliterated in a meeting with wandering Homo sapiens. Told almost entirely from the viewpoint of Lok, a slightly dim Neanderthal "with many words and no pictures," it’s an interesting story and a sad one.

But the power of the tale is softened considerably by Golding’s laborious, descriptive prose. At times I found it very hard to understand what was going on, as the Homo sapiens’ activities – drinking wine, portaging boats, arguing – were described in Lok’s terms at length, with little clarity. Discounting those passages, the novel was a good one, capped off quite amazingly with two more narrative voices. First we see Lok as a hairy “creature,” an “it,” and then finally we hear the story from the view of one of the humans, who, it turns out, are as scared and confused as the Neanderthals, whom they consider fierce devils. A skillful comment on how far humans have come from a natural state of innocence, acceptance and wonder.

[Stephen Bird · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am in awe of this book, Golding's craft, and his work in general (I have also read "Lord of the Flies" and "Darkness Visible"). The writing itself, whatever one thinks of the plot, is transcendent. I am impressed by what must have been prodigious research on Golding’s part to gain insight in the world of the Neanderthals, about whose specific reality modern man can only speculate. Whatever the Neanderthals lacked in intellectual capability, they more than made up for in their ability to use their senses, especially that of smell. As well as their possible telekinetic activity, which would have been unencumbered by more advanced intellectual processes. Golding's Neanderthals have an intuitive grasp of their world that is lacking in the modern human; on the other hand, the Neanderthals also live more wholly at the mercy of "Oa" (Mother Earth). The innocence of the Neanderthals is endearing, the "new people" Homo sapiens are dangerous and menacing. I felt compassion for the Neanderthals, and contempt for "the new people". The emotion that binds both species together is fear; -IE- Homo sapiens refer to the Neanderthals as "devils"; Fa tells Lok that “the new people are frightened of the air”.

The prose within "The Inheritors" is highly poetic; Golding paints an intricate portrait of a primeval landscape, such as our planet will probably never experience again; this description in itself adds to the atmosphere of suspense the author creates in this novel. It is not just that landscape in itself that is impressionable, but also how it is perceived by the Neanderthals and their "mind-dream-pictures"; -IE- the heightened colors seen by Lok during his hangover from the honey-drink. Golding shrouds his worlds in mystery to create a background of heightened effect, which becomes an integral part of the story; Richard Wagner used a similar technique by employing the orchestra as an additional "voice" in “Der Ring des Nibelungen”. One of the major themes of this book focuses on the evolution of innocence into corruption; a problem that unfortunately still exists in humans today. Another theme is that of the Machiavellian nature of mankind as a whole, specifically in how that behaviour was starting to evolve in Golding's portrait of Homo sapiens. I actually think this work is more engaging than the more commercially accessible LOTF (and certainly more so than the experimental-yet-inconsistent "Darkness Visible”). Golding is a recent discovery of mine, and I am looking forward to reading more of his work.

[M.J. Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Golding is a wonderful writer and this is a tremendously thought-provoking work. It has something to tell us about 'the fall of man' and the loss of innocence. Golding imagines the great forests at the crossover point for Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens. It is deeply tragic and quite shockingly violent. We see the world from the Neanderthals' point of view; they are in many ways like us but lack our imagination, clarity of thought, adaptability and (most sadly) our greed and brutality. This is not an easy book to read as it is written as if we are looking at the world from the Neanderthal perspective and with a less analytical mind. A masterpiece.

[Matthew · Rating 3 out of 5]

This might sound silly, but this small book of simple language confounded me. The story is told, not just by a Neanderthal, but by the dumbest Neanderthal in the book. His struggle to comprehend the changing world around him and to pin down the advanced technology of modern humans with concepts he could understand made parts of this story completely baffling. He sees boats as logs and paddles as leaves and representations of things as the real things they represent. It's a testament to Golding's brilliance that he could stage a whole book this way. This is definitely something I'm going to have to read a second time and maybe then I can give it a better rating.

[Josh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tough read especially early on. There were times when I thought quitting would save me from some stress, but I read a few reviews, got my bearings and remembered why I wanted to read this in the first place. I’ll spare the synopses, I’m sure you’ve read them all before.
Give this one room to breathe. Take your time. There’s some hidden beauty here, buried in the density of the prose. Be careful to reread when you have the instinct to as well. I found I could have easily missed some critical plot points had I failed to recognize that I had started to day-dream instead of read.

Finally, take your time to admire how the story is told and the beauty of some of the language:

“Who would sharpen a point against the darkness of the world?”

[Matthew Ted · Rating 5 out of 5]

Last year, staying with our friends in the south of France, near the border with Andorra, my family, girlfriend and I visited the Caves of Niaux. We were given torches, old mining-looking lamps, and told to follow our tour guide, but not before she asked if the family in sandals were German (they were). Then, in true French fashion, she went marching off into the slippery blackness and we were trusted to follow to the best of our ability. The tourists kept close to one another. Everyone was slipping, gasping and whispering as we made our way as best as we could. It was some forty-minutes, the tour guide had said, to the first of the paintings. Occasionally the guide stopped and we caught up with her. In these moments she had the decency to point out, at least to the first few ranks of the group (myself included) that a low bit was coming and that we would have to stoop nearly double to navigate it. Other times she stopped to give brief history lessons (Félix Garrigou; Commander Molard and his sons; Emile Cartailhac and Henri Breuil) or ask us a question. At one point she asked us why we thought the Victorians were wary of the cave paintings. Someone suggested it was because the Victorians did not believe early humans were intelligent. No, not quite. Finally, my brother spoke up: Religion. Yes, she said, and shone her lamplight on his face. Yes, religion. They did not like the cave paintings because of what they represented. It challenged their views on religion. And off we went again, stumbling and scuffing through the darkness.

Everyone gasped when we came to them. They are remarkable. Photographs were not permitted, of course, but there are photographs online. They are somewhere between 14,000 and 17,000 years old. Quite simply, the mind cannot comprehend that amount of time. It is unreal. After standing in awe before the paintings, we congregated again around our tour guide. She told us that we would now, in unison, shut off our lamps. Counting down from three, in English, we killed them. We do not know true darkness, it turns out. When not guided by streetlamps or headlights, we are guided by the light from the moon and the stars. I now know how positively bright these things are. The darkness that we were plunged into was bottomless. Primaeval. We were completely swallowed. I held my hand up in front of me and of course I could not see it (I could not see my nose going cross-eyed, either), but the very sensation of raising my hand felt completely alien, as if it was unconnected to my body, that was how deep the darkness was. I seemed severed from myself. When we were given permission to light our lamps again, everyone was smiling. I looked around the group and people were actually touching one another in what appeared to be sheer relief. My girlfriend touched my elbow. We were anchored again, reconnected to the visual world. On our return trip we were stopped again. Here, the tour guide said, is a special part of the cave. Firstly, she showed us more nearby paintings. This time with a demonstration. Of course, she said, we have to remember that the people who created these pieces of art were doing so by the light of fire and not trusty lamps. Stepping over the boundary line, she approached the nearest bison painting and held her lamp to it; then she cupped her hand and fanned it, so the lamp light flashed on and off the wall in the irregular way a fire gives light as it flickers. Now the walls were incredibly hard to concentrate on, and, to our amazement, the animals appeared to be moving. The flickering light gave them the impression of movement, of racing across the plains. Oh yes, she said, stepping back towards us, they were quite intelligent. Back with us, she told us to shine our lamps upwards. It was an impossibly large ‘room’. She believes, as others do, that this might have been the place where singing or rituals of some kind took place. She asked if anyone could sing and a sheepish, Eastern-European man raised his hand. She nodded at him. He began to sing, not in English, and the sound went spiralling up, like a released kite or balloon, before it seemed to bounce and echo all around our heads and return to us in a cacophony of undulating sound. It was majestic. We clapped for him and even in the lamplight we could see he had gone red. Now, she said. We must go back to the light.

I have relayed all this because it has been mingled with my thoughts of Golding’s The Inheritors over the three or four days of reading. He has somehow, with immense skill beyond my comprehension, written a novel in the ‘style’ of a Neanderthal (the epigraph is a quote about the appearance of Neanderthals from H. G. Wells’s Outline of History). The first few pages are disorientating as you acclimatise to the voice Golding has achieved. The most magnificent thing about it is how he captures the feeling of looking at the world but not quite understanding it. It is slightly out of reach. At times, I could almost feel Lok’s (the most central character) mind groping at understanding; there are descriptions that you must read once, twice, even three times, before you understand what it is he is truly experiencing or witnessing. Golding also gives them mystical abilities of sorts: there is a kind of telepathy (they can share ‘pictures’ in their minds with one another) and Lok’s sense of smell, particularly, can lead him with almost perfect accuracy. One of the most poignant examples of the ‘pictures’ is this,

He had a magnificent picture that would put everything right and tried to describe it to Fa who would not listen. Then he had nothing but the picture of having had a picture and this made him furiously angry.

And Ben Okri says in his introduction,

Perhaps the most striking thing about the novel is the way that Golding intuits the spirituality of the Neanderthals at a time when the received wisdom about them was that they were unredeemed savages. This is not the kind of thing research yields. It is felt.

The style is of the same quality: startlingly modern. It is hard to imagine that this was published in 1955. It feels so original, so fresh; I cannot imagine reading this seventy years ago. It is not an easy read. You have to read with a critical eye to reach the heart of the descriptions. Golding wastes no time explaining what Oa is, what the ice woman is, etc., but allows us to come to understand it in time. With patience.

So truly a special book. In a way it has altered my mind and sent it reeling back to those cave paintings in Niaux and considering all the things we are made of and have come from. Demanding, thought-provoking. Everything I look for in a novel. A shame that so many people read Lord of the Flies and never return to Golding’s work. I will now be tucking in.

[Lewis Woolston · Rating 4 out of 5]

What must it have been like to have been the last of your kind?
Science tells us that the last Neanderthals lived somewhere around Southern Spain, near Gibraltar, and were probably outcompeted and sometimes murdered by us, modern Homo Sapiens, the species who replaced them.
William Golding runs with this idea and creates a vivid, realistic story of one of the last Neanderthal tribes encountering a group of modern humans. The author fully immerses the reader in the world of these people and creatures. Things are explained through the eyes of the Neanderthals and their limited understanding of the world. The reader must adapt to that or miss the point entirely.
All in all an excellent book, one minor quibble: our scientific understanding of Neanderthals has increased greatly since this book was written so the portrait he paints is no longer entirely accurate. However the immersion into the drama of their world is still so full and enthralling that it's a worthwhile read.

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

A last tribe of Neanderthals (the People) arrive in their Summer home – a rocky outcrop near the top of a large waterfall. Peaceful hunter gatherers with an earth-mother religion, they do not understand tools, nor can they formulate complex thoughts, they speak simply and also they communicate telepathically through pictures. One day they smell strangers nearby and gradually the become aware of a tribe of Homo Sapiens (the new people) who have come up the river in dug out canoes and are camping on a river island. The new people steal the Neanderthal children and kill the tribe elders, only Lok and Fa, a man and woman, are left, and they set out to rescue the children.

Despite being written in simple language this is quite a difficult book to read. This is because WIlliam Golding has chosen to tell the story in style that suggest a Neanderthal mindset. Though it’s written in the third person the narration is skewed to suggest the protagonist - Lok’s - view. As he spies on the homo sapiens a lot of their behaviour is alien to him. He also has a strange way of describing everything — from the geography of places to interactions between characters — there is sometimes no distinction in his observations between the real and unreal and this gives the story a dream like quality that is often hard to follow.

The Neanderthals in the book are verging on that cliché of the simple, peaceful tribal people who, once again, represent humans before the fall, before consciousness. Where as the homo sapiens are more badly behaved, drinking, killing, beating etc. Stylistically it is an interesting device to use the writing to suggest the Neanderthal mind, I think it works really well but throws up lots of issues. At two points the narration jarred for me, when Lok used the words: ‘make love’, which sounded too twentieth century and also at another point when Golding stepped away from Lok’s view to give an authorial comment, and I can’t remember why, otherwise the style works really well. One of the other strange side effect though was that at the end when the narration switches to a Homo sapiens man’s view, he is suddenly starling sophisticated by comparison in the way he formulates ideas. The distinction works well but also makes the Homo sapiens feel very advanced.

The book's introduction suggests that Neanderthals didn’t have language, which makes sense, language is what separates us from other animals, it is the start of abstract thought and duality - separating and portioning everything out and printed words suggest that so strongly too, so maybe it would be impossible to use written language to create a Neanderthal view of the world, but Golding has given it a damn good try!

[Chris Gousopoulos · Rating 4 out of 5]

A topic that really fascinates me is the time when the Neanderthals co existed with the Homo sapiens. The last days of these prehistoric people trying to survive the harsh environment and the migrating waves of the modern people.
The Inheritors is about one of the last Neanderthal families and their encounter with the strange new people.

Golding is writing through a brave perspective, solely from the Neanderthal point of view managing to invent a genuinely unique and alien narration. Much of the beauty and challenge of this book is what the readers imagination will evoke from the primitive and alien voice

Throughout the whole book I felt a poignant feeling of horror and melancholy growing in me. Both for the profound actual times and the sad dusk of a race but also for the allegories of the story. The death of innocence. Some of the final scenes or quotes will stay with me for a long time.

"One of the deep silences fell on them, that seemed so much more natural than speech, a timeless silence in which there were at first many minds in the overhang; and then perhaps no mind at all...
...They sank then into a settled silence that might have been mistaken for abstracted melancholy"

“It is bad to be alone. It is very bad to be alone.”

"Restlessly he turned the ivory in his hands. What was the use of sharpening it against a man? Who would sharpen a point against the darkness of the world?...
...They were waiting in the rough ivory of the knife-haft that was so much more important than the blade."

[Troy Alexander · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well, that was bloody grueling! I realised as I was reading The Inheritors that, in a strange way, I feel a sense of duty to read William Golding’s novels, rather than a genuine desire to do so and I think this will be my last. I don’t enjoy his writing style and I knew that this novel - about a group of Neanderthals - was probably going to be a challenge for me. And it was. Because there is very limited dialogue it is basically pages and pages of description of the environment and of action that I didn’t find particularly engaging (lots of rivers and logs). Anyway, I see that it has received plenty of 5-star reviews so it obviously does it for some people. Maybe I’m missing something. I didn’t hate it; I just found it a bit of a slog.

[Ourania Topa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ίσως και 3,5 αστέρια, μόνο και μόνο χάριν των δύο τελευταίων κεφαλαίων. Το εγχείρημα της περιγραφής της καθημερινότητας και του - αμφιλεγόμενου ακόμη και από τους σημερινούς επιστήμονες - τέλους των Νεάντερταλ εξαιτίας της έλευσης του Homo Sapiens, σπουδαίο και αξιοπρόσεκτο, αλλά πολύ κουραστικό για τον αναγνώστη ως αποτέλεσμα.

[Frogy (Ivana) · Rating 2 out of 5]

Novogodišnja odluka da ne ostavljam započete knjige je bila jača od mučenja dok sam čitala knjigu....Tako da sam bila uporna, ali da me neko pita o čemu je nisam sigurna da bih mogla da prepričam. Premišljala sam se izmedju jedne i dve zvezdice, ali ipak dve.
Verovali ili ne bilo je momenata kada sam uspevala da pronadjem sličnosti u ponašanju tih ljudi i savremenog čoveka.
Nisam sigurna da sam je u potpunosti razumela, možda bi bilo potrebno ponovno iščitavanje, ali od mene ne u skorije vreme. Ima isuviše drugih divnih knjiga koje me čekaju :)

[Olethros · Rating 4 out of 5]

-Darwinismo en su esplendor al fondo, técnica arriesgada al frente.-

Género. Novela (con toquecitos de algún subgénero para afianzar la propuesta, pero ese no es su motor).

Lo que nos cuenta. En el libro Los herederos (publicación original: The Inheritors, 1955), Lok y su grupo viven en armonía con su entorno a muchos niveles, en una disposición social estable y conscientes, a su manera, de ellos mismos y la naturaleza. Pero las cosas son difíciles en el Paleolítico y, además de los desafíos diarios que estos neardentales conocían, la presencia de unos seres distintos con capacidades más prácticas que las suyas lo hará todo todavía más difícil.

¿Quiere saber más de este libro, sin spoilers? Visite:

http://librosdeolethros.blogspot.com/...

[Stuart · Rating 3 out of 5]

Neanderthals Gentle and Innocent; Homo Sapiens Smart but Violent and Cruel
Okay, it's not quite that simple, but paired with Golding's Lord of the Flies, it's clear that he had a bad experience as a teacher at boy's school. This book is quite an interesting experiment: trying to tell an entire story from the perspective of a young Neanderthal male named Lok and his small band of mainly scavenger/gatherers. What that means is that everything is told at the level in which he can describe things, so not easy to understand when he himself is observing the mysterious activities of the more advanced homo sapiens. Still, it's a well-written tale that while simple in outline, carries a lot of depth in message as he uses Lok's viewpoint as a mirror to show the very aggressive nature of humans.

But were Neanderthals really this gentle, intuned with nature, empathic, and even telekinetic? Of course this is almost pure speculation - all we know is the anthropological evidence of their bones and some basic living conditions and artwork. What went on in their heads is completely unknown. And the fundamental event this story depicts is that all-important encounter between them and homo sapiens, and we know it didn't work out well for them. But was that because modern humans wiped them out, or just overran their territory, or both? Who can say?

However, there was such an overt depiction of Neanderthals as the noble savages, peaceful and full of simple pleasures and fears, very closely intuned with the rhythms of nature, with a simplistic animistic view of the world, contrasted with the aggressive, deceptive, competitive behavior of homo sapiens, and how nasty their treat these gentle beings. I think Golding sacrifices plausibility to fit his pessimistic view of humanity, which is a distortion of what was probably closer to reality.

[Jovana Vesper · Rating 3 out of 5]

Do you perchance like this new Far Cry Primal? Or are you, like me, in love(!) with the movie "Quest for fire"? Are you interested at all in the subject of early human life?
If yes - then this gem of a book is a recommendation par excellance.
Dont get 'fooled' by three stars that I gave - they are my punishment. Cause when this story was finally in my arms some major stuff happended that made me read this book so brokenly..so..without concentration and investment that I practically read it out of spite.

[Romie · Rating 1 out of 5]

I really suffered reading this one. It's not that's not interesting once you finally understand what'd going on, but it just takes so much time to actually get into the story and understand the writing... I did not grasp the point of this book at all. It was just Golding's way to explain that he thinks we — the Homo Sapiens — killed off the Neanderthals, that's his explanation, but it could have been done so much better.

1.5

[Jack (Sci-Fi Finds) · Rating 2 out of 5]

Deceptively simple prose and dialogue forces the reader to carefully consider the language choices as you follow a family of Neanderthals encountering Cro-Magnons for the first time. Less descriptive passages left me struggling to visualise events. Despite David Pringle including this in 'Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels', this is not SF in my mind.

[Liina-Lotta · Rating 2 out of 5]

thought the basic premise was interesting and this had an unusual way of narrating the story, but personally didn't like the execution

[George · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting, engaging, original historical fiction novel about a small group of Neanderthals, whose lives are threatened by a larger group of Homo sapiens. All bar the last chapter are told from the perspective of the Neanderthals. The first half of the novel describes their life style. They are gatherers, not hunters. They savage meat from a tiger’s kill and feel guilty about it! They are not very intelligent, not using many spoken words. To begin, there are eight Neanderthals, an old man and woman, two young men and two young women, a child and a baby. The advent of homo sapiens leads to the disappearance of some Neanderthals. The homo sapiens are smarter and more ruthless.

This book was first published in 1955.

[Jane · Rating 5 out of 5]

Spoilers, if you care about that sort of thing. Although it would be hard to spoil this book.

In my second reading of the Inheritors, I tried to hold on to various details to visualize better the scene and what was happening in the parts told through Lok’s perspective. It’s hard and the details do not easily yield to my understanding. That is kinda the point and it is a tour de force of writing. I remain unsure who died and how. I still don’t know if a human appeared with a stag head and if he was sacrificed. But Lok, and therefore I too, was watching from holes picked in a dense ivy screen, among the branches of a tree, seeing and smelling and hearing things he could not understand, for which he had no pictures in his mind.

Moreover, all that he saw both reinforced and undermined his sense of identity. He became leader where he had formerly been the clown and always told what to do. But his attraction to the New People also destabilized him. Eventually he is alone—in a life world defined in all respects by being together.

« Fa did not move. A kind of half knowledge, terrible in its very formlessness, filtered into Lok as though he were sharing a picture with her but had no eyes inside his head and could not see it. The knowledge was something like that sense of extreme peril that outside-Lok had shared with her earlier; but this was for inside-Lok and he had no room for it. It pushed into him, displacing the comfortable feeling of after sleep, the pictures and their spinning, breaking down the small thoughts and opinions, the feeling of hunger and the urgency of thirst. He was possessed by it and did not know what it was. ». P.173

This encounter between The People and the New People, between Golding’s Neanderthals and his Homo Sapiens, (this is not a book of anthropology nor of history!) brings change that cannot be incorporated and therefore is ultimately destructive of The People who are fewer in number and less advanced. Or are they less advanced? Golding neither asserts nor answers that question. I thought one of so many brilliant ideas, was that the New People, with their bows and arrows, their boats, their fire water, were afraid of Lok and his tiny remnant. They fled the dark forest and the forest devils. But in their coming and going, they also robbed the unity of Lok’s people, leaving behind only the fracture of inside-Lok and outside-Lok, which was also the unity of the five or six senses by which The People lived in their world.

So we know that Homo Sapiens strode off into the future triumphant. But not in The Inheritors. They are left with the same tragic ambiguity that attends us still:

« He [leader of the New People] had hoped for the light as for a return to sanity and the manhood that seemed to have left them; but here was dawn—past dawn—and they were what they had been in the gap, haunted, bedevilled, full of strange irrational grief like himself, or emptied, collapsed, and helplessly asleep. It seemed as though the portage of the boats … from that forest to the top of the fall had taken them onto a new level not only of land but of experience and emotion. The world with the boat moving so slowly at the centre was dark amid the light, was untidy, hopeless, dirty. ». P.224-5

The writing and the ideas make The Inheritors one of my all time favorite books. While most of the book is seen through Lok’s eyes, Golding employs a couple of changes in point of view toward the end that bring a degree of resolution I had not anticipated. It is gripping and moving. Lok is an unforgettable character. Like all great art it is filled with spaces that beckon more thought and more understanding.

*************

This is my first reading of a novel by William Golding. I heard The Inheritors discussed on the brilliant podcast Backlisted, and their appreciation of the book was borne out for me in the reading of it. Briefly, it is the story of the tragic encounter between a small band (perhaps a last remnant) of Neanderthals and a more advanced group of Homo Sapiens. Golding is so brilliant at having the reader experience the story through the senses and mind of Lok, the main character. The Neanderthals are small, hirsute, emerging from all fours and into language and the way you experience this in the reading seems nothing short of miraculous. As the encounter between the two groups unfolds, you too will experience Lok’s confusion, fear and attraction to these strange New People. In this way the book can be challenging as you try to understand what is going on, but simultaneously there is tremendous narrative drive and suspense. Plus the writing is beautiful.

I have always been fascinated by early human and prehistoric time. It’s what we come from, as though you could encounter in such stories a possible distillation of what humans are and what we could be. Or where we went wrong, or if we ever lived in a sort of Eden. The Inheritors succeeds in all these ways. I loved the book.

[Daphna · Rating 5 out of 5]

It took me a couple of days to think about this novel, before I could actually formulate my thoughts. Shades of Lok, our Neanderthal protagonist.
The novel is a brilliant exercise in reading. As the narrative advances, it requires that we develop the patience, endurance, and perhaps even tolerance, to recognize the existence and validity of a view point that is "other" to us, even when we are unable to grasp this perspective, or translate it to our language. That makes for a very challenging, at times frustrating, and ultimately, a most worthwhile read.

The historical truth is really not important here. We, as readers, see only what Lok, the Neanderthal, sees, hear and sense only what he hears and senses, and are able to capture and understand only that which is within his grasp. That is the frustrating part. There are pages upon pages of descriptions of Nature and of the "new people," who we know to be the rising homo sapiens, and there were many passages in which I felt I had no idea what Lok was talking about.

Lok and his people are endowed with a very high level of sensory perception, and despite their minimal language skills, they communicate telepathically, a skill considered in our day and age, as exceeding that of language. Their perception of the world is through pictures and there is no language barrier to their telepathic communal sharing of these pictures. So who is backwards here, the new people (us, homo sapiens), or the doomed Neanderthals? As we know, the answer to that question is unimportant; the only relevant question is which of these people will be the fittest for survival.

Juxtaposed with the Neanderthals are the new people who are constantly talking, and communicating as we do to this day- through the symbols of language. Lok's people share the "thing" itself, whereas the new people use a language symbol to describe that same "thing". Their language is their strength. Their language empowers them to initiate, to think abstractly and to develop new skills. Lok's people are only able to do what has always been done. The new people have agency, and that is their evolutionary leap.

The novel's plot is simple; the challenge, as a reader, is to constantly inhabit Lok's perception, whilst being unable to comprehend, as he is unable to comprehend, most of what he encounters with the new people. Being homo sapiens we do finally understand that the bent stick and the straight sticks perceived at first as gifts from the new people, are bows and arrows being used against them, but unless I read the novel again, some of the descriptions will remain unfathomable to me, as they were to Lok.

The story takes place on a ridge (if I understand Lok's descriptions correctly, not sure of that), near a waterfall, and the novel has an abundance of biblical "Fall" metaphors. The Neanderthals are portrayed as a pre-Fall people, innocent and unaware, and the homo sapiens as post-Fall People who have awareness and knowledge. I am less a fan of these metaphors.
It is only in the last chapter that the perspective changes and we are given the new people's perspective. With their failings, their cruelty and their subjugation of nature, they also have language, they have tools, and they have agency. Despite the biblical metaphors, they, the bold, will rise and inherit the earth, whilst the meek and innocent will disappear.

[Feliks · Rating 3 out of 5]

The kind of novel from a kind of intellect which developed from a kind of education enjoyed by a kind of man who no longer figures in our society. Worthy to be read on that merit alone.

A fine companion-piece to "Lord of the Flies" in which Golding is able to display his special forte: that is, describing the 'wildness' in man's nature.

This particular book is cleverly conceived and it is nimbly, ably, deftly executed. What you observe is a very confident set of skills wielded by a writer practicing his craft in an age of great writing (e.g., prior to personal computers).

Golding had a clear challenge to overcome in this tale of early humans--so early they had only rudimentary language and scant sense of 'time before now' or 'time to come later'. The difficulty lay in replicating a semblance of the 'likely' thought-processes for hominids who could not even draw; and suggesting intelligible speech-habits of creatures who maybe barely only grunted, in real life. How does that translate into a dialog-rich, modern English novel?

This is where Golding had to draw on his own power of invention. Some of it works and some of it is strained; but eventually the clear, firm characters propel the story forward at a brisk and pleasurable pace. By the end of the tale, you can definitely feel your heart-strings tugged upon as these splendid half-humans gradually expire.

The poignancy emerges (I think) because throughout the tale, the tribe simply does not know they are doomed--by the inevitability of Darwinian evolution--to extinction. In their moment, they are as alive as any man was ever alive; vividly so. Enjoying fire, shelter, a full belly, breeze, the sun, the seasons...just as we all do. That's really what it's all about. Golding's revisiting --in this story--of these 'basics' of human life is very welcomed. I wish there were more novels like this; because I think we are increasingly forgetful of how vital it all is.

In general, any book written by William Golding is going to reside at a high level of quality and readability. As I've tried to express, he is part of the old school of English novelists who simply delivered their stories, cogently, flawlessly and without hesitation.

I look forward to reading what is said to be his best: 'The Spire'.