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This month features The Inheritors by William Golding, Faber, 0571192580, £7.99
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SPOILER WARNING: THE FOLLOWING GIVES AWAY CRUCIAL ELEMENTS OF THE PLOT
The Inheritors is a family drama set in a time before – or what seems to be before – the invention of the family.
Its title derives from the Bible, Matthew 5:5; this is the Sermon on the Mount, in which Jesus says, ‘Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.’
William Golding sets his novel at perhaps the most crucial point in history: the very beginning.
The blurb of my old Faber copy gives away one of the novel’s surprises: ‘an exploration of the lost world of Neanderthal man’.
The Inheritors is concerned with the first encounter between the Neanderthals and those who would become homo sapiens – those who would eventually become us.
Golding’s epigraph, taken from H.G.Wells’ Outline of History, is carefully chosen to confuse the reader, ‘Says Sir Harry Johnston, in a survey of the rise of modern man in his Views and Reviews: “The dim racial remembrance of such gorilla-like monsters, with cunning brains, shambling gait, hairy bodies, strong teeth, and possibly cannibalistic tendencies, may be the germ of the ogre in folklore…”’
After this, the novel’s opening description of gentle, curious, social Lok (our Neanderthal hero) and the other members of his tribe is likely to be misread as about homo sapiens. William Golding, although this isn’t at first clear, wants to write a revisionist version of history – and of immediate pre-history. The H.G.Wells view would be that history began with humankind, and that the Neanderthals, apelike ogres, were pre-human. Golding’s thesis, bluntly put, is that history is also pre-human, and that the inheritors of the earth weren’t necessarily meek.
Lok’s tribe (no family relations are perceived by him) have just moved their camp, following the passage of the seasons. Their life of fire-keeping and foraging is interrupted by the arrival of the New People – homo sapiens. The New People are so different that it is almost impossible for Lok to perceive them. Slowly, however, it becomes clear to the reader that the New People have brought with them art, war, pollution, slavery, lust and intoxication. A haphazard battle takes place between the two peoples to see who shall survive, who shall dominate. There are kidnappings and escapes, reconciliations and murders.
The story of The Inheritors is very basic – hardly surprising, given the limited means Golding allows himself to tell it. Although there is clearly an implied narrator behind the action (Neanderthals, whatever their other qualities, did not structure novels), moment-by-moment the voice stays within the consciousness of Lok. This leads to many estrangements and then revelations:
‘Suddenly Lok understood that the man was holding the stick out to him but neither he nor Lok could reach across the river… The stick began to grow shorter at both ends. Then it shot 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: a twig that smelt of other, and of goose, and of the bitter berries that Lok’s stomach told him he must not eat.’
Looking back, it is clear how logical it was for Golding to follow Lord of the Flies with The Inheritors. He was attempting to make some very large statements about human nature and its essential brutality. In the 1950s (the novels were published in 1954 and 1955), so soon after the Second World War, this was seen as almost a trueism; nowadays, we tend – against all evidence – to see ourselves as a lot nicer than we are.
The Inheritors was a very brave novel for Golding to write. It could quite easily have been a ridiculous failure. But apart from a few moments of unintentional comedy, the overall conceit is carried off with something beyond either conviction or brilliance.
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