The Inheritors

I read THE INHERITORS back in the early 60's when I was a home mother with six kids. The book was so intellectually stimulating that I could not forget it. I have been a Great Books leader, a journalist, and a novelist in the forty or so years since reading THE INHERITORS and I still consider it a classic. I have been asked to nominate a book of the 60's to Pinellas County, Fl. libraries for discussion and have chosen THE INHERITORS. It combines the depth of literature with an implicit concept of the underpinnings of the 60's. My books are STAND FAST and FREEDOM'S COST.

I haven't been so emotionally involved in a book since...well, for a long time.This novel is about a family group of Neanderthals who travel to their cave for the warmer part of the year and meet there a group of modern men. The resulting events are as intense and terrifying for the reader as they are for the Neanderthals. Because Golding shows everything from their point of view, we are often left as puzzled and uncomprehending as they. The descriptions of objects the we know about -- bows and arrows, boats, alcohol -- are written as the Neanderthals saw them. The actions of the modern humans -- their rituals and hierarchy -- Golding makes successfully foreign -- but when we sit and think about what we've read, we realize, wait, I *know* this, this is what humans do.The characterization is achieved deftly and sensitively, Lok and Fa are compelling as is their fate. Prehistory was very likely *not* like this -- but the themes stand, and this book is powerful.I do not think Golding is doing a disservice to our species, because this is how we are. He is telling a damn good, if tragic, story. I will re-read this book over and over again, I know. Golding is truly great, and this book is greater, in my opinion, than the oft-assigned "Lord of the Flies."

Golding simply holds up as an excellent, if not classic, author no matter what subject he researched and pursued. I couldn't put this novel down. Golding takes his readers on a journey into a world seen through the eyes, visions, and emerging language expressions of primitive man. His sensitively drawn characters, whose language is limited, form `pictures' in their minds and use this mental illumination to guide them to food, to their seasonal homes and to acquaint them to possible dangers. The descriptions are marvelous: cold, wet, hungry, dependence on a sense of smell (you find yourself sniffing a lot), stones for weapons, hyenas signaling a kill for the band of our earliest ancestors to steal, recipes cooked in a style that remind one of haggis (no refrigerator raiding is elicited in this read by the way) and a lush plant entwined forest of the early spring replete with mystical ice women to be worshipped.Within the pages, the author's imagination, ideas, and symbols are used at their best removing the reader from the world of 2001 into a consideration of the earth and stars alone, untouched by any sort of technology. Essentially it is Lok and his small Neanderthal band that are faced with other humans, unlike themselves, for the first time. The 'other' (homo-sapiens) is armed with bows and arrows, sharpened tools made from bone and an ability to cross rivers and lakes by rowing logs. Golding possibly was inspired by the scientific find of a primitive people who could cross the water discovered sometime in the early 1950's. In any event this is a story that readers will find to be absorbing and has the potential to provide an insight into a daily life of a society devoted to survival with only the earth as a guide to how. Wiliam Golding tells a stirring, astonishing story with a writer's technical virtuosity applied as only he can do.

This amazingly inventive piece of fiction takes on some of the same themes the author dealt with in Lord of the Flies, but in a surprising way. In this novel, the protagonists are the last of the Neandrathals who are in deadly conflict with emergent Homo Sapiens for their survival. Golding imagines these people as being essentially pre-verbal and it is a testiment to his skill as a writer that he can create effective characters without the tool of dialogue. Because of this convention, and the need to keep the story from the Neandrathal's (not quite human) point of view, it takes some time for the reader to achieve an understanding of what is happening and why. It becomes, nevertheless, a very moving story and one of the more inventive tales in serious modern literature.As a companion piece from the current Homo Sapien point of view, one might want to read Beards novel about a hypothetical new jump in evolution, Darwin's Radio.

This book is complex but worth the effort if you have an IQ of more than room-temperature.The comment by a previous reviewer is worth taking up:"And now I have an even bigger reason to dislike this book. I happen to hate reading screeds that trash the author's own ancestors. I'm sure homo sapiens were not perfect, but please show me a race or culture of people who are." Well, I'd agree, strongly. But it's not as simple as that: the Homo Sapiens Sapiens in The Inheritors are not shown as deliberately and strategically wiping out the last Homo Sapiens Neanderthalus. Rather, they are terrified of them. They think they are defending themselves against horrifying demons - why do they submit to the discipline of the whip to drag the canoe up the portage? Plainly they are half out of their minds with terror, which the Neanderthals cannot comprehend. Further, the Neanderthals, though gentle and innocent, are plainly inadequate. The process of their replacement by the Homo Sapiens Sapiens, or Cro-Magnards, is cruel but it is not morbid. The Neanderthals, it is clearly demonstrated, are at a dead-end (they are only a vestige of a tribe at the beginning of the story). The survival of the Neanderthal infant means some of their gentleness and innocence may survive into the new world. It is actually a relief to get into the Cro-Magnards' minds in the final chapter after the limitation of having to see everything from a Neanderthal point of view. The Cro-Magnards are at one point called "the people of the fall" - in religious terms they are the people of the "Fall" indeed - Postlapsarian Man. Unlike the Neanderthals, they do have knowledge of good and evil, and we see at the end even the rudiments of conscience - which is not to say the end of the Neanderthals is not utterly tragic.Like all Golding's earlier works, this is the exploration of difficult moral dilemnas. There are lessons there but they are not easy.